


The Comfort of a Mother

by JessieMay



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Bottom Rick, Carl POV, Compassionate Carol, Compassionate Daryl, Depraved Alexandrians, Excessive Reference to Rick's Nipples, F/M, M/M, Male Lactation, Manipulative Carl, Maternal Rick, Nipple kink, Not an Omegaverse fic, Nursing Kink, Oblivious Rick Grimes, Protective Carl, Ricksploitation, Slice of Life, Stressed-Out Rick
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2018-10-29 21:27:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10862424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessieMay/pseuds/JessieMay
Summary: When Judith gets especially cranky, it seems that no amount of formula or rest can calm her down. What she needs is the kind of comfort that only a mother can provide. With Lori gone however, it falls to Rick to fill that role. Carl is fascinated.Or— The Walking Dead, in which Rick breastfeeds Judith and it's strangely normal.





	1. The Prison

The first time is an accident. 

Rick had been sweating out in the fields all day while Carol watched Judith, and now he holds the infant girl to his bare chest while his freshly washed shirt hangs drying over the railing.

He’s rocking her small body gently and looking ready to doze off himself when suddenly her mouth clamps around his nipple. 

Rick yelps. 

Slowly and very carefully, he manages to dislodge himself from her tiny mouth. Afterward, he stares down at her and his own blushing and swelling nipple. When he looks up at his son, startled and confused, Carl thinks he looks like he just found a Walker in his lap. Judith squirms even harder as if trying to get at him again.

It keeps happening after that. Even when Rick is careful to wear a shirt, Judith seems to know right where to find him beneath the fabric. Carl doesn’t understand how it’s possible. Some kind of baby’s intuition, he guesses.

As a result, deep furrows begin to settle in his father’s brow. Carl doesn’t like them. It’s the same drawn and hollowed look Rick gets when he knows he can’t give Carl something he wants. Carl so hates the sight of it that he’s stopped asking his father for things for fear of the stress it puts on the man. 

Carl overhears Carol pulling Rick aside one day when Judith is having a particularly violent fit that no amount of formula seems to help. The woman speaks slow and careful like she’s explaining something complex to a child. She tells Rick that it’s as much about the milk as it is the sense of comfort the child gets from the mother. _Comfort._ She stresses the word and pauses after as if allowing it to sink in. Carl can see his father’s sleep-starved face amassing more lines as he tries to piece this together. Carol must see the difficulty he’s having too.

“ _This,”_ she says and her eyes drift downward. “Might be good for Judith... now that she won’t have Lori to give her that kind of care.”

While stated plainly and with all the best intention of anything Carol says, it still stings Rick. Carl can see it as the woman steps aside, places a hand on Rick’s shoulder, and leaves him to think on it. Rick’s face falls to the twisting and screaming little body in his arms. 

After a while, something changes in his face. That awful look of helplessness and inadequacy slowly falls away, and in its place is something firm, something determined.

Carl watches, transfixed as his father first shifts Judith to one arm, then slowly begins undoing the buttons of his shirt. It takes a little while with one hand, but Rick is determined. When he’s gotten just low enough, he pushes one flap aside and shifts Judith’s head to the opening.

Carl knows the very moment the girl latches on by the way his father’s soft breathing breaks into stuttering gasps, and his gentle shushing turns into short, pained yelps. His face is twisted in discomfort, but that same determination remains. It seems to take all he has to keep holding the infant girl’s head against himself.

Carl is amazed when, within seconds, Judith’s crying completely stops and her body goes limp against Rick’s chest. She’s as still and quiet as a doll. Completely content.

Rick too is struck by the almost immediate change in his daughter’s temperament. Suddenly, he releases a breathy laugh, then looks up to give Carl the biggest smile the boy thinks he's ever seen. Carl, who hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from the scene since the beginning, smiles back. 

Carl thinks he’ll always remember the look of pure elation on his father’s face in this moment. It’s unlike anything he’s seen from the man in a long time, certainly not since Carl's mother died. It’s as if this one thing, as small as it may seem, has won Rick back a scrap of the hope that had been all but lost. In this moment, as his daughter draws from him, Rick is reassured that he can still provide for his child, even if it's only the comfort of his body. At the very least, he can give her that.

 

 

After the initial surprise wears off and people start getting used to seeing Rick and Judith this way, everyone in the prison soon rallies behind their leader, quick to lend their support and guidance. No one more so than Carol and Daryl.

One day, after observing Rick struggling with Judith’s position on his nipple and looking clearly distressed, Carol comes up and makes a small adjustment to the angle of the infant’s head.

“You have to guide her to the right position sometimes or it’ll just be hell,” she says.

The small adjustment produces an almost immediate effect. Carl watches Rick’s tension melt away as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Panting slightly, he smiles at Carol, looking impossibly tired but grateful.

She pats his cheek and before leaving reminds Rick to change sides occasionally to give each breast a break.

“Breasts,” they say. Carl didn’t know until then that you could call them that on a man. There are a few new terms he’s picked up actually.“Nursing,” is another one. That’s what they call it when Rick has Judith sucking on him like that. It isn’t uncommon that someone will ask after his father and someone else will respond with something like, “oh, he’s nursing Judith in Cell Block B right now,” or something like that. “Feeding” is what they call Judith’s end of it, which always makes Carl think of Walkers, and he isn’t sure he’s comfortable with the association.

Another day, while Rick sits at the tower on watch, Carl keeping him company and Judith cradled to his chest in what has become her default position when Rick has her, Daryl comes up to check on him. The tracker looks down at Rick, his beady eyes made somehow smaller as he inspects the dark and swollen nubs peeking out from between Rick’s shirt flaps.

“You should rest ‘em,” he observes, low voice just audible enough for Carl to hear. “You been at it long. They’re lookin’ raw.” He reaches out to brush one flap aside to get a better look at the nipple not currently occupied by Judith.

Rick looks down to see for himself and his brows draw together. Carl can't help noticing how completely worn-out he looks. It’s one of the hotter days but Rick usually sweats anyway when he lets Judith “feed” on him. Carl can see the strain of discomfort as his father forces himself to endure what must be a very taxing experience.

“Want me to take her?” Daryl offers and he’s already moving forward.

Rick sighs. “No.” He examines the side with Judith. “Won’t be much longer now. She’ll be asleep soon.”

Daryl doesn’t look satisfied. When his eyes flick downward once again to the bruised little nubs, he seems to reach some internal decision. “Gonna see if I can find somethin’ for ‘em.” It’s not really a question and before Rick can respond, the younger man is striding off in search, Carl guesses, of something to soothe the ache of Rick’s overused nipples. 

Carl is glad Daryl thought of it. The sight of Rick’s chest, particularly right after he’s been nursing, is something Carl finds himself thinking about often. Sometimes he’ll even catch himself thinking up ways he could help ease his father’s discomfort.

Carl finds himself following his father around more often, eyes fixed on him, ready for the telltale signs of Judith’s growing crankiness to propel the man’s fingers to the buttons of his shirt. Carl watches for Rick to pull aside the flaps, and then the breathless moment he positions her head over the exposed bud, and finally the flash of discomfort followed by exuberant relief as the girl takes hold, instantly sedated as she suckles at her father contentedly.

The sight is like nothing Carl has a word for. It casts a strange and unfamiliar light on his father, who, up to this point, had always been a tender, yet distinctly masculine figure in his life. Carl had been too young himself to remember his mother ever doing this for him, though Carol tells him she did. He get’s the impression that she says it to make Carl more comfortable with the whole thing. While the sight is definitely strange no matter how many times Carl sees it, he can’t say for sure that it’s a _bad_ strange. 

He can’t explain it.

 

 

 

One night, Carl is up reading by candlelight while Rick lies in the bottom bunk, already asleep. It isn’t late, but the man is exhausted and goes to bed early when he can. Rick is on his back with one leg hanging off the mattress and hasn’t moved since he’d come in and collapsed in that position. 

He isn’t wearing a shirt and Carl finds his eyes drifting over to him occasionally. 

After days when Judith is particularly fussy, Rick tends to leave his shirt off at night, finding the fabric too abrasive against the over-sensitive skin. 

It takes Carl a while to finally work up the courage to reach out and touch one. When he does it’s velvety and smooth and gives a little beneath his fingers. Carl thinks his father must be cold because both nipples have been standing at full attention all the while he’s been laying there, tugging at Carl’s focus while he'd been trying to read. Now that he’s close, he can see the small goose bumps around the rosy nubs and confirms it. Still, he’s more interested in the rosy nubs themselves, which are somehow both pliant and tough to the touch.

Without thinking, he squeezes one between his thumb and finger and Rick hisses, stirring.

“C-Carl?” He says, eyes cracking open to reveal pale irises. 

“I’m sorry, Dad!” Carl rushes out but doesn’t withdraw his hand.

From beneath heavy lids Rick surveys his son, shifting slightly where he lies. 

“Not…not so hard, Carl,” he whispers at last, soft and dreamy as his hand comes up to pat his son's.

“Okay, Dad,” Carl says, smiling gently at the exhausted man.

Carl only traces circles around the tender bud for a moment more as Rick falls back into a deep sleep. Then, with great care and even greater restraint, Carl leans down and presses a kiss onto one nipple. For a moment, he feels it between his lips but quickly pulls away, receding back to his book by the wall. There he sits, casting only occasional but lingering glances to the man breathing softly on the bed. 

 

 

 

Although Judith is fed and rested and that takes care of much of her fussiness, it seems that food and rest alone can’t fully substitute that special connection between a mother and child. Soon, everyone in the cell block understands that when Judith is having “one of her days”, Rick’s special kind of comfort is the surest solution.

One day, as Rick is laying out a scavenging rout to the group on the main floor of the cell block, Beth comes in clutching a fitful, wailing Judith. She apologizes for interrupting and Rick nods at her, his hands already going to his shirt.

He keeps describing the plan as he takes the infant into his arms and only pauses briefly to gasp when the girl latches onto him. Stroking her head where he holds it against himself, Rick finishes hashing out the details and listens to the ensuing debate that erupts amidst the group. 

Carl, who has a hard time following much of it, notices the faint glow of sweat on his father’s forehead and chest along with the subtle twitches of his mouth and brow as he tries to listen to his people while simultaneously being assaulted by Judith’s eager mouth.  When it seems like the baby has finally calmed down, Daryl rises swiftly, as if anticipating the very moment, and goes to retrieve her. Gently, he takes the infant from Rick, who nods gratefully to the tracker.

As Daryl wordlessly goes to return Judith to Beth, Rick prompts the group for any more questions. With nothing more to address, Rick concludes the meeting. 

As the room clears out, Carl watches his father begin buttoning his shirt again, taking special care toward the top where the fabric brushes his tender skin.

 

 

  

Patrick is a tool bag. Carl had heard Daryl use the term about one of the newer residents who tends to take half-hour long showers, and Carl feels sure that it also fits Patrick. 

One day, Carl enters the cell block and spots the bespectacled boy standing over where Rick is sitting on the steps with Judith. Patrick is staring openly at the man’s exposed chest between the open flaps of his shirt where Judith is currently feeding on him. With wide, wondering eyes, he asks Rick questions, which Rick answers pleasantly and patiently.

Just then, Maggie comes up and takes Judith, who seems to have fallen asleep, leaving Rick fully exposed. Lately, he’s taken to rubbing an ointment on himself after nursing, something that Daryl brought back from a run. He does so now and Patrick, who’d been in the middle of another question, seems suddenly to forget the rest of it.

Carl walks up and tells Patrick that Carol needs him outside to help prepare the meat. Patrick nods dutifully, says goodbye to “Mr. Grimes,” and leaves. Carl doesn’t usually lie, but he doesn’t like the way the other boy is always staring at his father, particularly when he has Judith. 

Rick smiles up at him, eyes as tired as always but unmistakably happy to see his son.

As Rick slowly and carefully buttons up his shirt, they walk along the cell block together, sharing stories about each other’s day.


	2. The Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carl and Rick stumble away from the burning prison. They don't know what happened to Judith and the others but they soon find a house to stop and rest.
> 
>  
> 
> Chapter tags: Rick/Carl

It’s over a day later when Rick finally wakes up and Carl thinks he’s never felt such relief. The overwhelming joy of seeing his father open his eyes again, as blood-shot and swollen as they are, is enough to make him forget that they don’t know what happened to Judith or the others, even forget how angry he’d been with the man for failing to protect everyone at the prison.

The rest of the day is spent getting Rick hydrated and fed. Carl even helps him wash up with some of the water they can spare. Rick’s clothes are dirty and mostly unsalvageable so Carl finds him a fresh t-shirt from one of the bedrooms to replace his shredded button-up. It’s clean and white and fits him well enough.

When they’d first stumbled upon the quiet street of large, multi-storied white homes, Carl thought he’d never seen houses so big and beautiful. Now, as he struggles to get his father up the stairs so he can lay out on one of the large beds, Carl wishes they’d found a smaller house in which to make camp. 

Rick is more rattled than upset when Carl tells him he’d gone out scavenging while he was unconscious, and is too tired to scold him for it. Carl suspects he even feels guilty for having left him unsupervised for so long. Nonetheless, Rick tells him not to go out again until he’s well enough to join him.

So, confined to the house, Carl spends the rest of the day reading the books he finds in one of the kids’ rooms, eating highly-processed snack foods, and helping his father get around when he needs to. 

Now, as the sun is setting on their second day in the big house, Carl lies in the large master bedroom while his father falls in and out of sleep beside him. Rick is on his back as he’s been all day and Carl think it’s the least painful position for him. Like this, Carl can watch the way his chest rises and falls softly.

Beneath the t-shirt, Carl can just make out the slight protrusions of his softened nipples. They’ve been soft all day aside from when Carl had helped Rick wash earlier and the cloth brushed over a dormant nub making it swell and redden from the attention.  Yesterday, as the man had lain unconscious on the couch downstairs, Carl could see the maroon nubs peeking out through the large tears in his button-up. He’d only regarded them with a distracted curiosity, too worried at the time about whether Rick would wake up. 

He _had_ noticed how soft they’d looked, however, and how shrunken. Although still their burnt color, they hadn’t been as flushed and plump as Carl had grown used to seeing them back at the prison. He wonders if they’ll just go back to normal now that Rick has gone without nursing a hungry infant for a few days. 

Idly, Carl reaches out and traces a finger over a sleepy mound.

Rick makes a soft, groggy sound.

Carl continues until Rick’s nipple is hard and standing beneath the cotton.

“Dad,” Carl says.

“Mm?”

“What you did, what you did with… Judith.”

A minute current of tension passes through Rick’s body at the name.

“When you would…nurse her.”

Rick swallows and Carl can see the bob of Adam’s apple in the fading light.

“Yeah,” Rick says.

“Why did you do that?”

He’s never asked his father directly and Rick has never asked him how he felt about it.  While Carl thinks he has a pretty good understanding of it, he wants to hear it from Rick.

“Well,” Rick says, words coming slowly in his exhaustion. Although he’s tired, he takes his time to carefully formulate his answer. “Your mom would…would’ve done it if she…She would’ve… like she did with you, but…”

Carl sees the apprehension in his brow.

“It’s for milk, right?”

“Yeah, but…but it’s more than that … s’hard to explain.”

Early on, before The Governor came and destroyed the prison, Carol had found Carl alone in his cell and explained to him how nursing was something mothers normally did for their babies, but now that Lorie was gone, Judith wouldn’t have that. She’d explained that although Rick didn’t make milk like a woman, he could still provide that same instinctive comfort.

Rick is still struggling to place the word and Carl saves him the effort.

“Comfort,” he finishes for him. “It would comfort her. Right?”

Rick peers down at him beneath heavy lids. 

“Yeah,” he says.

“She’s lucky— _we’re_ lucky— to have you, Dad.” Carl strokes a comforting hand up and down Rick’s chest, drawing a soft sound from the man. “We’re lucky that you care so much, I know you try so hard. And…I don’t know where Judith is but if—“

Again, Rick stiffens.

“I just…I want you to know that I know you did everything you could for us and—and everyone at the prison, and well… I don’t… I don’t blame you, Dad.”

Through the failing light, Carl has only the feeling of Rick’s quaking chest beneath his hand and the sounds of stuttering breaths to determine that his father is crying.

Carl thinks back to something else he’d learned in the prison, something Carol hadn’t told him. He’d caught glimpses of it every time his father nursed Judith, but never more than that first time. He remembers the way his face had brightened the moment Judith stopped crying, and how he smiled bigger than Carl had ever seen anyone smile. Beyond the physical discomfort and exhaustion, was a deep and profound contentment. Carl realized that as Rick provided that special comfort that only a parent could, he too was comforted. In a world of so much uncertainty, the knowledge that he was needed and useful to his child— if even in just this way— was as much a gift to Rick as it was to Judith. That precious sense of usefulness and rare certainty had been lost with the prison—with Judith.

Carl sits up on his elbows and looks down at his father. From the uneven breathing, he guesses the man is still crying a little.

“Can…can I, Dad?”

Rick stares at him. “Wh-what?”

“Can I?”

After a long pause, in which even the shaky breathing has stopped, Rick gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

“Why?” Carl asks, automatically.

Rick is silent.

“Dad?”

“It's...” Rick tries, then says firmly, "No."  

“Why not?” Carl hadn’t expected this response and it incites a sudden and unforeseen bitterness in him.

Rick’s mouth is open as he stares up at him, appearing to struggle with an answer.   “You just…you can’t, Carl. You just…”

It’s unbelievable. Rick is outright denying him and he can’t even give Carl a reason. Carl bets he doesn’t even know. He never knows anything about his body since he’d started nursing.  Carl is incensed.

“You let Judith do it!” He snaps down at the man. “What? What is it?”

" _Carl."_

He’s too old. Carl is sure that’s it. Judith is a baby and Carl had been the same when his mother had done it for him. Carl is strange for wanting to do this now, his father is surely thinking it. 

He says it out loud and no sooner is it past his lips than his eyes begin to sting. He rolls away; although it’s mostly dark now, Carl doesn’t want to risk his father seeing his tears.

“It’s … it’s not that, Carl,” The man says gently.

“What is it then?” Carl spits. 

“It’s just…it’s just that. You … know why I do…why I did that for Judith.”

“Yeah Dad,” Carl groans. “You did it to calm her down.” He’s tired of people thinking they need to explain it to him. Somehow he’s too old to nurse but not too old to get talked to like a child.

“Wait, Carl. Will you just... listen?" Rick takes his son’s silence as reluctant attentiveness and does continue. "Well, a little bit before…everything at the prison…"

"The Governor," Carl says.

Rick swallow.  “Well, a little bit before _that_ , I started to…well…” 

After a while, Carl looks over his shoulder to see what's gotten his father so quiet. As his eyes adjust to the dark, he can make out the way Rick is biting his lip.

“Started to what?” Carl asks. Despite his agitation, he’s very curious.

“I started to make… _milk,”_ Rick says at last.

Carl blinks through the dark.

His father goes on to explain that he’d heard Judith crying one day and noticed fluid seeping through his shirt.

Carol had told him that it was nothing to worry about and that it wasn’t unheard of. She'd told him that the male breast had all the necessary equipment and given enough stimulation, they could adapt to produce their own milk if the need arose.

“Shoulda seen Daryl,” Rick says. “Couldn’t believe it. He was so worried, he wouldn’t let Judith feed on me until he was sure nothing was wrong.” He chuckles softly at the memory, then goes silent.

Carl can easily picture the wary tracker, his beady eyes looking Rick over, maybe swiping his fingers through the strange substance as it leaked from Rick’s nipple. When determining how near an animal was, Daryl often did that with droppings before bringing his fingers up to his nose, or even his mouth to get more information. Carl wonders if he did that with Rick’s milk.

He swallows and for a moment his mind is completely blank.

“So, you see,” Rick says. “I would, but…I don't think you want—”

“Are you still making it?” Carl hears himself ask.

Rick blinks up at him. Even in the dark Carl can see his surprise. He hadn’t expected this reaction from his son.

“I don’t…I don’t know,” Rick says, and he sounds as sincere as he is surprised. “I didn’t make…very much of it. I don’t really know…how it works.”

“If I…” Carl breaks off, swallowing again.  He doesn’t know how to continue but thinks he knows what he wants. “Could… could you make it if I…”

Rick stares at him breathlessly.  “You… you _want…”_

Without a second’s pause, Carl is nodding.

Rick licks his dry lips. “I…I don’t know.” He turns away and although Carl can’t see it well, he knows his father’s face has taken on that old look of inadequacy and self-doubt, and he instantly regrets asking.

“I…I could try.” Rick says at last.

Carl’s heart leaps.

 

  

There’s a breathless sound. 

“N-not so—not so hard, Car- _Carl._ ” He presses gently at his son's head.

Carl pulls away at once and looks up at his father, babbling apologies.

“It’s alright, Carl. It’s alright. Jus'… not so hard, okay?” Through the lines of moonlight pooling in from the blinds, Carl can see his fathers quivering belly.

Carl nods before leaning down to once more take Rick’s nipple into his mouth, gentler now. 

He guesses whatever natural instinct had allowed Judith to latch onto Rick in just the right way, didn’t stay with people as they got older. Rick keeps hissing and Carl knows he’s hurting him.

Distantly, Carl remembers Carol passing through the main floor one day as Rick was having a particularly rough time with Judith. As Rick had been making noises similar to the ones he’s making now, the woman teased that men couldn’t handle pain and that was why women were the nurturers.

Now Carl wonders if Rick is just being oversensitive. 

Rick’s chest rises and falls with uneven breaths. Carl tries to take his time, despite the energy vibrating through him. He’d been thinking about this for so long and now that it’s here, he doesn’t know if he’s doing what he’s supposed to. 

One of Rick’s hands is in Carl’s hair, not pressing, but only resting there. The man makes a small distressed noise and his chest leaps. Carl had been getting too rough again. He’s learning though. It’s mainly when he uses his teeth that Rick reacts that way. Carl makes an effort to use only his tongue and lips and not to pull so intensely.

Soon, Rick is only making soft hums, his chest vibrating with the pleasant reverberations, and his breathing eases. Carl pulls back to flick his tongue over a hardened nub and it snaps back, rigidly. The last time he’d done that, Rick’s leg jerked slightly and he gasped. This time is no different but the fingers in Carl's hair twitch too.

Finally, after what might have been half an hour, Rick gently pats Carl’s shoulder.

“Okay, that’s…that’s enough, Carl. That’s enough.” His voice is as soft and drowsy as Carl has ever heard it. He strokes his son’s head and although Carl wants to keep going, he allows his father to push him off. 

As Rick slides his shirt back down, Carl recedes to the other side of the bed.

Strangely, Carl finds he does feel more relaxed now and very soon falls into a deep and restful sleep.

 

 

 

There hadn’t been any milk. 

The next day as they eat dry cornflakes, Carl asks his father about it. 

The man seems startled by the question at first. Then, with an explanation interrupted by many pauses, Rick gives two possible reasons for it. He says that mothers can “dry up” if they go without nursing for long enough, says it happened with Carl’s mother when Carl had gotten old enough to wean off of her.

“But has it been that long?” Carl cuts in. They’d only fled the prison a few days ago.

Rick shrugs, sifting through his bowl of flakes with his spoon. He’s as unsure about it as he is about most things when it comes to his nursing. Carl wishes that Carol were there so he could ask her, but doesn’t say it aloud for fear of making his father sad, and they’d been having a pretty good morning.

Rick says that it could also be that they hadn’t been eating very much. Back at the prison, they had an abundance of food available to them, fresh meats from Daryl’s hunts and vegetables from the garden at every meal. There, Rick’s body had all it needed to produce the rich substance. Now, however, fueled by only stale cereal and snack foods, Rick’s body is probably using all available nutrients just to sustain itself. 

The idea is deeply distressing to Carl.

For the rest of the meal, he watches Rick eat across the table.

 

 

 

Carl tries to go out to finish clearing the remaining houses on the street. He wants to get them more food. He wants to get _Rick_ more food.

Again, Rick forbids it, his cracked and breathy voice a stark contrast to the authority he’s trying to exude.

Carl complies if only to calm him down. Rick still needs to rest and Carl is afraid that if he did go, Rick would try to follow after him. As it is, the man can barely stand on his own, let alone defend himself out there if something should happen.

With nothing more to do with his day, Carl does what he did the previous day: he reads a little, eats a little, helps his father get around when he needs to, and rests beside him on the large bed to pass the time. Or rather, he _lies_  beside him.

“Sleep, Carl. Need your rest,” Rick murmurs.

“Can’t,” Carl says. It’s broad daylight and since Rick won’t let him go out and work off all this energy, he's restless. 

“Try.”

Carl shuts his eyes, opens them, flops over onto his back.

Rick sighs.

“I’m not tired!” Carl moans.

“ _Sleep_ , Carl. You gotta sleep so you’ll have the energy to run and fight and live. We gotta keep goin'.” 

“ _Where_ do we gotta keep going?”

“We just…we gotta keep goin',” Rick says and it seems to take a lot out of him.

Carl sighs. Rick only wants what’s best for him, Carl knows that.  Propping himself up on an elbow, he wets his dry lips.  “I might be able to sleep if… “ Carl trails off.

Rick cracks open his bruised eyes and regards his son. 

Carl lets the plea come through his stare and glances down at Rick’s chest.  “Can I, Dad?” He sees the muscles leap in the stubbled jaw.

Carl thinks his father wants this too. Some part of him must crave it, the same part that felt the urge to comfort his daughter in the first place.

Rick finally nods and returns Carl’s smile with a small, nervous one of his own. Together, they carefully push the t-shirt up over his chest.

For a moment, Carl takes in the sight of his father, his lean chest and stomach exposed, the bruises more clear in the daylight and still painful looking. Rick’s cool blue eyes, which already stood out in their purpling sockets, are set further alight by the white of the t-shirt bunched up beneath his chin. Those eyes stare up at him patiently and nervously and Carl thinks there’s even a hint of eagerness there. Carl recognizes the coloring in his face just above the lengthening stubble from when Rick would nurse Judith. It had been too dark the night before to see it. Carl can see it perfectly now.

In the brief moment before he takes Rick into his mouth, Carl wonders if his father has eaten enough today.

Then Rick’s breathing shifts. With his hand on Rick’s belly, Carl can feel the slight quiver of muscle beneath clammy skin.  Carl keeps his eyes up on his father’s face. He’s so caught up in the sight of the man and the joy that he’s allowed to do this, that Carl forgets to take care. Rick hisses and suddenly his hands are pressing at Carl again.

“Sorry, sorry,” Carl whispers, lips brushing the tender nub as he speaks. He presses a light kiss against it in apology. 

Rick’s breathing eases again and he moves his hands away.

As Carl feeds on one nipple, his hand moves to the other, only tracing at first but as Rick grows used to it, Carl becomes more eager, finding he enjoys the feel of it beneath his fingers. He squeezes and pulls like his lips would do, rolls it in firm circles like his tongue would do. Soon he’s waging a synchronized assault on both nipples, one with his mouth and the other his hand. 

Rick’s breaths have become short and labored. When Carl looks up, he sees the man’s eyes half-shrouded by the curls strewn across his face, his flushed mouth open and panting beneath.

It feels somehow natural to slide his hand down Rick’s heaving belly, over the dip of navel and further.

“Okay, okay, okay, Carl,” Rick breaths out and presses Carl’s hand away. 

Before Carl can register what's happened, Rick is pulling his shirt back down and turning away onto his side. 

“Will you—will you sleep now?” The man asks, sounding somehow out of breath. 

Staring down at the man, who won't look at him, Carl can only nod.  Feeling confused and frustrated, he finally pulls away from his father and moves to the opposite side of the bed.

 

  

When Carl opens his eyes, he doesn’t know how much time has passed. He only feels that sluggish haze of someone who’s gotten too much sleep.

It’s light outside.

He rolls over to regard his father. 

Rick is still asleep, or in that dreamy state that’s like sleep. Carl thinks the man hasn't allowed himself fall asleep fully since what happened on their first day there.

Carl eyes the profile of his father’s face and reaches up to touch him. He only means to brush a curly lock from his brow and to run his fingernails through the abrasive bristles of his beard, but he keeps going downward. As Rick hums softly, Carl’s fingers trail down his neck, over the formidable Adam’s apple that’s far more pronounced than Carl’s own, then onto the dip of collarbone peeking out from the shirt. 

“Carl,” Rick breathes, stirring a little.

Beneath the white cotton, Carl can see the faint protrusion of softened nipples and grazes them with a pass of his hand. 

“Carl, sleep.” Rick clears his throat and shifts slightly so his head is turned away. The angle makes the muscles in his neck leap out and Carl regards them a moment.

He passes his hand once more over the now stiffening nubs through the shirt. 

Another groggy moan and it seems that Rick has given up the resistance, either from exhaustion or Carl’s perseverance. He even helps a little, arching his back slightly so Carl can lift the hem of the white t-shirt up over his chest. 

Carl takes his father’s continued silence as permission and proceeds to take Rick into his mouth. He’s so eager now, fearing that the man will fully rouse any second and push him away again. But Rick remains pliant, though he isn’t fully asleep. Like before, he voices soft, occasional complaints when Carl is too rough but otherwise allows the boy to feed on him, only bringing his hands up to rest on Carl's head. 

As he alternates between nipples, Carl begins to notice a strange furrow in Rick’s brow. It isn’t pain or anger, but something else, a kind of discomfort.

_Sadness_ , Carl realizes and almost stops what he's doing. He wonders if Rick is remembering Judith and how she would feed on him this way. He wonders if doing this now gives the man any peace. 

With that in mind, Carl suckles more gently, being even more careful to avoid the scrape of teeth. He doesn’t know how Judith would feed and, from Rick's soft sounds and fretful look, Carl can’t be sure if he’s doing it right.

He experiments with his fingers again, pulling away enough to see the flushed nubs pinched between thumb and index, rolling them around, tugging and twisting lightly.

“Too…too hard. Gently, gen-gently, Carl,” Rick says at one point, but Carl feels like he _is_ being gentle. He guesses after everything he’d already done, Rick is probably getting raw now. He remembers with Judith how Rick’s nipples used to get so sensitive sometimes that he had to wear his shirt open at night to avoid the brush of the coarse fabric.

Looking now, Carl sees that they look nearly as swollen and red as they used to back at the prison.  He looks up to find Rick’s face half covered by his hand, his hair tossed and curled with sweat.

Maybe Carl really is being too hard.

Again he slows down, returning to suckling gently and Rick soon seems to calm.

It’s soothing in a way that Carl can’t define. Like Rick, Carl's instincts seem to take over, and he's soon lost in the act. Time passes and Carl doesn’t realize he’s been rocking against his father's thigh until he feels Rick pushing at his head.

Carl is squeezing Rick’s “breasts” in both hands, laving his tongue generously over one nipple then the other, when he realizes Rick’s gasps are not from pleasure.

“No. No, Carl!”

This time, Carl clings to his father, but Rick pushes even harder with strength Carl didn’t know he still had. Rick pushes so hard in fact that Carl topples off the mattress. When Carl scrambles to his feet, he finds Rick sitting straight up on the bed.

Carl can’t remember a time his father ever pushed him like that.

Rick too looks shocked. The older man stares, wide-eyed and frozen, his chest, still exposed and raw, is rising and falling rapidly as he takes in what he’s just done.

“You want me to go,” Carl says.

Slowly Rick shakes his head.

Carl moves for the door.

“Wa-wait… Carl, wait!” Rick calls after him.

As he storms down the stairs and out the door, gun in hand, Carl still hears his father crying out to him from upstairs. He doesn’t stop and doesn't look back.

 

 

 

When Carl get’s back, he finds Rick standing in the kitchen, pouring something into a bowl. 

As if he’d been monitoring Carl’s approach through the window, he hurries to finish and in his rush spills some of the contents on the table just as Carl comes in. Quickly Rick sets the box down and straightens up. 

From Rick’s neat and slightly damp hair and the freshness of his still-bruised face, Carl thinks he’s cleaned himself up a little.

“Hello, Carl,” Rick says, standing straight. It looks like an effort for him.

Rick looks to the table, drawing Carl’s eyes to where he’s prepared them two bowls of corn flakes. 

Carl gets it.  Rick made them dinner.

Carl's been out scavenging for much of the day and now has _real_ food for them. Still, catching the hopeful glint in his father’s glassy eyes, he moves wordlessly in to take the seat already pulled out for him.

As much effort as Rick seems to be putting into standing, the act of sitting appears even more difficult. Carl catches the way his father grabs at his side when he bends to take the opposite seat.  He hates to think of how Rick got himself down the stairs and bites back the urge to scold him for it. Rick is trying so hard.

Rick doesn’t pick up his own spoon until Carl does.

Although they eat in silence, Carl can feel the tense energy coming off of his father from across the table. Between bites, his pale eyes watch his son out of bruised sockets, ready to listen if Carl does choose to speak. 

When Carl is finished, he stands. Rick stands as well— too quickly, and instantly clutches at his side again, grimacing.

“Easy Dad. Just…stay.”

Slowly, Rick sits again as Carl goes to fetch his bag from the other room.

He returns and unloads his findings on the table in front of Rick, who watches silently, looking paler and paler as each item is unveiled.

“Where…where did you go?” He croaks at last, when the impressive loot is fully revealed and Carl has begun working open one of the cans with his knife.

“This house at the end of the street,” Carl says and shrugs, setting the now opened can down in front of Rick. “It had a stocked up storage room in the basement.”

“Were…were there…” Rick licks his lips.

“Walkers,” Carl says. “Yeah. Three or four.”

Rick looks up at him.

Ignoring the sickly color his father’s face has taken on, he slides the can of peaches closer to the man, encouraging him to accept it. Rick finally does, picking up his spoon again.

“I’ll have to go back tomorrow to get there rest,” Carl continues, sighing. “There was a lot down there.”

Rick seems to almost choke on his mouthful when he hears this. After swallowing, he finally speaks and Carl notices his voice is drawn and careful.

“Carl,” he says. “You shouldn’t—“

“What, Dad?” Carl stares down at him.

Rick looks down at the table and Carl feels his sudden anger subside.

“It’s not safe, Carl.”

They speak no more after that and Carl is content watching his father eat the food he’d gathered for him.

 

 

 

After Rick tries to climb the steps on his own for a little while, Carl decides it’s too painful to watch and helps the man back up to his room. 

“Where are you going?” Rick asks hurriedly after Carl sets a new water bottle on the bedside table then moves toward the door.

Carl turns back to see his father sitting up in the bed. Rick looks somehow worse than before Carl had left and the boy wonders if the strain of too much activity too soon had worsened his injuries.

“Just going in the other room, Dad. Relax.” 

Rick’s eyes drift down and Carl is about to leave again when he hears the soft, shaky voice.

“If you…if you want, you could…” Carl turns and sees his father’s hands move toward the hem of his shirt.

The action paired with the downward cast of the man's eyes makes something stir deep in Carl’s belly.  “No, Dad. _Stop._ ” He tries to say it gently but Rick still looks a little wounded as he moves his hands away from his shirt.

Rick wants to feel like he’s of some use to his son even in this state, and Carl knows he’s just robbed him of that. Still, he hasn’t stopped feeling upset with his father and wants him to sit with it a little while longer.

“I’m just gonna be in there.” Carl points to the room a little ways down the hall. “Just call if you need anything.”

Rick nods again and Carl leaves.

 

  

 

Carl is reading in one of the boys’ rooms when he hears it.

“Carl! Carl!” It’s a broken, blood-curdling cry.

There’s a clattering and a loud thud and Carl immediately throws his book aside and bolts to the largest bedroom.

There, Rick is on the floor, grappling with the dresser to pull himself up and nearly tipping it over on himself.

Carl bounds in and sets it right again.

“Carl!” Rick screams again, panicked and horror-stricken.

When he finally looks up and sees his son, the alarm in his large eyes subsides only slightly. 

“Dad, what happened?”

From the sounds alone, Carl had feared a Walker had somehow gotten in. Rick, sweating and panting and eyes blown wide, looks like he’d fought off at least three of them.

Rick doesn’t resist as Carl helps him up and guides him back to the bed.

As Carl helps him get settled again, Rick is speaking in hoarse, urgent whispers.  “Please,” he says. “Don’t go out there, don’t— don’t go out there again Carl. _Stay._ Please.”

Carl realizes his father must have dozed off and had a dream that Carl had left again. He looks as shaken as when they’d left the prison. As shaken as after they found Judith’s empty seat.

“You can’t go, Carl. Please, just— just stay inside.”

Carl presses the damp head down onto the pillow as Rick tries to sit up again.  The man looks feverish as he pleads desperately with his son.

Although it’s true that they will eventually run out of food and that it will be Carl who’ll have to get more for them if Rick isn’t well enough, he manages to convince his father that he won’t be leaving just yet.  Rick still looks uneasy, but nods.

“Where are you going?” He asks again and Carl turns. “Please, don’t. Please. Stay.”

Carl was only going back to the other room but as he looks at his father, with his round eyes and features gaunt with exhaustion and worry, he rethinks it. 

“Alright,” Carl says, and crawls into the bed beside his father.

Rick lies on his back and Carl rubs his hand up and down his chest in a soothing way his mother often did for him, and after a while, Rick calms down and dozes off again.

 

 

 

“Carl,” Rick says.

Carl is surprised the man is still awake. Carl had begun dozing off himself.

“Carl.”

The boy opens his eyes to see Rick beside him, on his back with his shirt pulled up to his chin. He’s watching Carl with a bated expression.  Carl is caught on the look for a while but then glances further down.  It’s still light enough outside that Carl can see that they’re swollen looking and darker than the last time he’d seen them and he looks up questioningly at his father.

Rick looks even more uncomfortable somehow.

“I thought…” he begins, with difficulty that isn’t from his injuries. “I thought I could make more for you. I tried all day while you were… away. I was able to get some to come out but now I think that was all of it.” He looks away, and Carl sees that familiar shade of inadequacy set in. As always, the sight makes Carl’s heart sink to the pit of his stomach.

Well, that would explain why they’re so inflamed. Carl hasn’t seen his father’s nipples look so over-used since Judith was feeding on them regularly. 

So, Rick had tried to surprise Carl. 

He imagines the man sitting on his own, shirt tugged up, face contorted in discomfort and concentration as he tried his best to squeeze milk from himself. Carl bets he probably hurt himself doing it but kept going, desperate to make his body produce something he could present to his son for his approval. It strikes a chord in Carl. As much as it embitters him to think of his father abusing himself that way, it also warms him. For a moment, he’s even willing to forget that his father had pushed him so roughly earlier.

As he scoots closer to the man, it occurs to Carl that Rick is only doing this to give Carl what he wants. Still, Carl thinks it will also help Rick, even if the man doesn't realize it. It will make him feel like he has use and value to his son, and Carl thinks Rick needs that more than anything right now.

So he leans in and takes one flushed and puffy nipple into his mouth, and Rick emits a shaky gasp.

 

 

 

Despite what Rick had thought, it turns out he _does_ have more milk in him. 

It startles Carl when he discovers it. He’d been going on for a while, being careful not to hurt Rick and getting lost in the contented sounds reverberating through the older man's chest. He nearly pulls away when it happens but, realizing it’s his father he’s tasting, Carl latches on even tighter, suckling gently but thoroughly.

The taste is strange but because it’s Rick, Carl thinks it’s right. He wonders if it came from the food he’d scavenged and finds he enjoys it more, imagining that what he’d provided his father had allowed him to produce it.

It’s a small amount and he sucks until no more comes, before releasing the depleted nub and moving on to the other. Mid-way he pauses. He’d been so focused on the newness of drawing from his father, he’d all but forgotten the man. When he looks up, he sees the slits of his father’s eyes and the hints of pale blue rolled back beneath the droopy lids. He has one arm draped over his forehead so Carl can’t see if the furrows are gone. Still, he thinks Rick looks relaxed and is glad that the milking doesn’t seem to bother him. 

Carl takes the other nipple but now keeps his eyes trained on the man’s face above. The moment he tastes the warm dribbles on his tongue, he thinks Rick sighs. Still, it seems like everything he does draws some sound or another from the sensitive man so it’s hard to tell for certain whether it was from that.

“Can you feel it, Dad?”

Beneath, the droopy lids, the pale blue roll around lazily before finding Carl.

“Hm?”

“Can you feel the milk coming out?” Carl leans down again and sucks until he tastes it. 

Rick's eyes drift up to the ceiling as he seems to concentrate.

“I…I think so.”

“Hm,” Carl says, and the vibration seems to send a shiver through the man beneath him.

Curious, Carl hums again, and again Rick shivers.

“Carl,” his father groans, his chest swelling. “Tickles. Don’t.”

Carl can’t help laughing at that. “You’re so sensitive, Dad,” he teases, channeling Carol.

Rick scowls lazily down at him but there’s a curve to his lips. Carl laughs and hums again.

“ _Carl!_ ”

 

 

 

There’s very little of it and when it’s gone, Carl continues a while longer, still enjoying the feeling of feeding on his father. Rick doesn’t push him away and Carl senses he won’t, even as it starts hurting him. Occasionally, Rick even brings his hand up to his mouth as if to stifle his own discomfited sounds. Carl knows Rick is trying to please him, is fearful of losing him. A part of Carl knows it’s wrong to use that against his father, but can’t help how empowered he is by it.

When the heat comes again he reaches down almost instinctively, wanting to make his father feel good too.

“Please, Carl, no,” Rick says softly above him, and it’s his first protest. “I love you but…”

Carl can’t help the bit of frustration that sparks in him, but does move his hand away. 

Rick doesn’t stop his son when his hips rock against him, or when Carl slides up to place a kiss on his mouth. It’s sweet. 

When it comes it’s the most beautiful thing Carl thinks he’s ever felt.

 

 

 

Later, after Terminus, they discover that Judith survived. They’re all relieved, but Rick has never looked happier. 

They soon find a priest, who takes them to a church and Carl’s relationship with his father falls back into something like a normal routine.

Rick goes back to nursing Judith regularly, handing her off to Maggie or Tyrese so he can rest or help with runs. It’s not as safe as the prison, nor as sustainable, but it’s home for now and they’re all together. Carl thinks that’s enough for Rick.

Still, sometimes at night, Carl will crawl over to where Rick is sleeping and slide up beside him. The man will stir slowly awake and, recognizing his son, he'll move dreamily to lift his shirt. As Carl sucks on him, feeding from Judith’s leftovers, Rick will make soft contented sounds and stroke his hair. Carl will fixate on the flush in his father’s face and the way his body relaxes beneath him in the dim light. He’ll look content, useful, happy, and Carl will be happy too.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got crazy long I know, but you guys earned it after the wait.
> 
> There's actually even more of this XD So let me know what you guys think and if you're interested.


	3. The Church

 

 

It isn’t the safest place, not a place to set up permanently, but they have enough food for now and it’s secure at night. With Judith nursing regularly again, Rick adapts to make more milk for her. Carl is constantly amazed by his father’s body.

He expects the new people to be more surprised by it than they are.

There are four of them. Three are together, one is alone.

The first time they see it, Rick is assigning groups to break up and scavenge the surrounding areas. He doesn’t bat an eye when Judith starts kneading at him, but immediately moves to unbutton his shirt and guide her to him. There’s the familiar sharp intake of breath before he continues. The four pairs of eyes drift occasionally while Rick is speaking, but they don’t interrupt, don’t ask questions— not then. Carl wonders if someone pulled them aside ahead of time. First, he thinks it might’ve been Glenn, who arrived with them, but then Carl remembers how Tyrese had headed them off at the door. The large man, who’d grown very attached to Judith since the split off at the prison, had spoken so low that Carl couldn’t hear it. Whatever he’d said must have been convincing; even the big redhead had nothing to say.

 

 

The extra milk Rick produces can be a problem when they’re away from camp for too long.

Carol had explained to Carl one day how it worked, how when a mother goes a while without nursing, the pressure will build up in the breasts and become uncomfortable. To relieve the pressure, the mother has to _express_ the milk.

Carl watches his father and comes to recognize the signs that it’s getting to be too much for him— that he’s getting _full._

Rick will always hold off as long as he can, doesn’t want to slow them down, but they can all see the tension in his jaw, the sweat on his brow, and the extra care he takes in his movements.

“Dad, just go. It’s alright,” Carl says on a hunt one day.

Rick looks at him, a little startled as if he didn’t know how obvious he was.

“No, it’s fine. I’m alright. We’ll keep goin’.” And he does keep going for a while, until he can’t and nods stiffly to Michonne before going behind a tree.

Rick’s always embarrassed about it, doesn’t like anyone to see him doing it. Carl can't understand it at first, can't see how expressing milk is any different from Judith feeding on him, and Rick never minds people seeing that.

But then Carl catches him one day. 

They’re on a run and Carl is keeping watch so his father takes care of himself. He doesn’t think Rick knows he can see, but doesn’t think he’d mind. Leaning against a tree, the man is biting down on the hem of his shirt, both to keep it up over his chest and, Carl thinks, to muffle his own sounds. It looks uncomfortable— _painful_  even _._ Rick’s face is red and contorted in concentration, his fingers tireless as they work the nubs that look tender and inflamed even from Carl’s distance. Finally, after so much effort, the thinnest pale rivulets dribble out from each nipple, down his heaving chest, his abs, and at last sink into his waistband. 

 

 

The new people begin to settle in with them, though they talk often of leaving. Carl doesn’t mind them, mostly. 

He likes Tara. She’s funny and helps with Judith.  The other three keep to themselves usually. Carl sees Rosita glancing over at Rick occasionally when he has Judith. He thinks he catches a faint smile on her lips sometimes, but it’s strange on such a hard woman. 

Eugene, who’s beginning to remind Carl of Patrick, blinks mechanically and asks questions that confuse Carl. Rick too seems overwhelmed by the man’s robotic curiosity and often looks like he’s searching for a way out of conversations with him. If Carl doesn’t swoop in, Daryl usually does. 

Abraham stares openly, brow furrowed and lips in a half wince like he’s still trying to wrap his mind around it. He hasn’t done more than stare though so Carl guesses he can deal with it.

 

 

Eventually, they find more formula. 

It’s a relief mostly; up until then Rick would get up multiple times some nights to nurse and comfort Judith himself. His nipples are now so battered from the regular use that they stand constantly erect beneath his shirts, and Carl laments how course the fabric must feel over the raw skin during the day.

With the formula, they can all take shifts to feed her at night, and Rick sleeps more restfully. 

But while Judith feeds from the bottle, Rick continues to produce milk, and as a result, the pressure builds.

Twice a day, Rick has to express the milk.  He isn’t good at it, they all soon learn.

Carl was right when he thought he saw pain on his father’s face that day in the woods, as the man mercilessly wrung the milk from himself.

Rick tries though. In the close quarters of the small church, everyone hears his frustration. Even when he goes to the back office and shuts the door, they hear his distressed gasps and grunts inside. Finally, Carol or Daryl— either one— will go back and see to him. Shortly after, the noises stop. 

Soon, Rick wastes no time in going straight to one of them when he needs expressing, having given up on the turmoil and pain of attempting it himself.

One day, shortly after Daryl has returned from a hunt and is showing Carl and Tara how to load the crossbow, Rick comes out from the church, looking harried and restless. Someone fed Judith and hadn’t asked him, Carl can see it. Now the man glances around shiftily as he shuffles up close to Daryl. His hands fidget at his sides as he speaks low, but Carl knows what he’s saying— what he’s _asking_.

Daryl stops what he’s doing and fixes Rick with a look Carl has also come to know.

With a brief glance toward them, the hunter unloads the bow again, hands it over to Tara, and tells them not to do anything ’til he comes back.

Together Daryl and Rick go inside.

As Carl and Tara wait on a bench, voices carry from the back office.

“You oughtta learn to do it right. Can’t go hurtin’ yourself,” Daryl says. “Now, watch me.”

“No, Daryl, please… too sore. Just do it. _Please_. Been achin’…”

“Where's Carol?”

“She’s out. _Please,_ just—“

“Alright alright, easy.”

Then Daryl closes the door.

“Seems a waste,”Abraham says, sitting in the aisle with Sasha and Bob. 

Idly, they listen as Rick’s fitful sounds from the back room slowly die down. 

“We’re all out here sucking juice from a pheasant's gullet and he’s back there just gushing mother’s nectar from his pecs.”

“Crying over spilled milk, soldier?” Sasha quips.

“All I’m saying is, they could bottle that shit up or something, ‘stead of just… letting it go to waste like that.”

“What makes you think they’re wasting it?” Bob says and they all go silent. Even Carl turns to look at him.

“Are you suggesting,” Abraham says. “That they’re going back there to suckle man milk straight from momma Rick’s teat?”

“Saying it’s a possibility.” Bob shrugs. “It’s a new world.”

“Well, _shit_.” 

“Where are you going?” Sasha calls after the soldier, who’s striding down the aisle with purpose.

“I’m not sitting here contemplating drinking my own piss and pretending it’s lemonade, while they’re back there sipping on some farm-fresh 2%.”

Sasha and Bob share a look and burst into laughter.

Carl is up and off the bench, bounding after the man. Before Abraham can reach the door, however, it opens, and Daryl comes out, followed by Rick. The hunter only passes a brief glance over Abraham before walking past him. Rick, slightly flushed but much more relaxed than when he’d entered the office, nods evasively at the soldier before stepping around him as well.

“You ready?” Daryl asks, meeting Carl in the aisle. 

Carl nods and walks with him, casting only a brief glance back to the redhead, who’s still standing stunted by the back room where they'd left him, looking like an addlepated bull.

As they pass Bob and Sasha, the two are still laughing.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is Rick bad at expressing his milk, you ask? Because pervy fanfiction, that's why! X) I hope you guys enjoyed.
> 
> Let me know what you think. Next stop: Alexandria!


	4. Alexandria Safe-Zone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they settle into this new community, Carl finds that the Alexandrians are strangely accepting of his father's situation.

 

 

Carl doesn’t know how long they’d been out there before Aaron found them.

After the fall of the Church, their dwindled group had been on the road non-stop. The losses weighed heavily on them— Bob, Beth. Tyrese was the final blow.

It was Carol’s idea that they should try to wean Judith off of Rick.

“You won’t always be there,” she’d said. “Sooner or later, she’ll have to learn to rely on herself.”

Rick had nodded. He knew it was true. Carl hadn’t liked the idea of preparing for another split from Judith, but he understood. In this world, nothing's permanent.

From then on, they’d all traded off, taking Judith for equal shifts. On his turns, Rick fought not to give her any more attention than she needed, even as she prodded at him, trying instinctively to get at him through his shirt. Carl could see how it wounded his father to not let her feed from him.

He didn’t have any milk to give her anyway. Hunger and stress had dried him up. They were all hungry then. Carl had fantasized about sneaking sips of the formula they carried with them, but knew they couldn’t spare any. Judith needed it, even if it didn’t soothe her as much as Rick did. 

On the really bad days, Rick would cave and take Judith from whoever had the shift. Ignoring Carol’s disproving looks, he’d lift her to his breast. Although he had no milk to give her, Judith always calmed. Carol was right when she’d said that babies needed more than just the milk of a mother.  


When Aaron found them, their little group was hardened, half-starved, and half-crazed from too long on the road.

Rick didn’t trust the well-dressed man and his photographs that were like nothing Carl had seen since the world changed, but they’d been out there too long and were dangerously low on formula. Rick had to think of the group. He had to think of _Judith._

So Aaron took them back to the Safe-Zone where, now, against all odds, things have started to slow down again. Since they’ve been here, they’ve found that the little town, like a suburbia, has more than they could've imagined. Carl had forgotten about running water and air conditioning and beds with real mattresses. Here, they have stores of food, and at night, they not only have a roof over their heads but a big tall wall that borders the whole settlement. The first few nights, they huddled close in a single room in a single house, unused to being more than arms reach away from one another. 

On the third night, Rick and Carl share a look on the porch (a real porch), and Carl can see that his father is restless. Carl understands; these people aren’t like them.  But for now at least, they’re all together, and they’re safe, and they’re fed.

Maybe it’s because of this that the milk starts up again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s the young boy, Sam, who starts it. 

At the welcome party, the small blonde comes running into the room, his eyes red and streaming.

He goes right to Jessie, bawling and tugging at her shirt. To Carl, he looks too old to be behaving that way, and if he hadn’t already been sure of how sheltered these people are, that would’ve confirmed it. Carl turns to Rick, expecting a look to mirror his own bemusement, but instead sees something like genuine concern on his father's face. 

And then it happens. 

“What is…is that…” It’s Pete, who’d ignored his son’s blubbering approach as if it was no uncommon occurrence. With his drink hovering forgotten near his lips, the tall man’s eyes now hone in on Rick’s shirt.

Finally, Rick too looks down. “Oh,” he says, face coloring. He looks around him, probably in search of something to dry himself.

Jessie looks to see what has gotten everyone so silent and, finding it, she too seems to forget her son.  Confused by what has snatched his mother’s attention, Sam looks up as well. 

Now, all three Andersons are staring at Rick, whose clean new shirt is blossoming two stains on either side of his chest.

“Here, Dad.” Carl hands him a cloth he’d snagged from the snack table.

Rick nods, takes it and rubs at his shirt, but seems to know that it’s futile.

“Are you…” Jessie begins.

“ _Lactating_?” Pete finishes, and it’s said so loudly that the whole room goes quiet.

Rick hasn’t looked up but Carl knows he’s trying.

He’d been able to get the whole prison group and the church used to this somehow, even achieved a kind of normalcy. But here, Rick has to be strange all over again. He’d shaved his beard, cut his hair, put on clean clothes, all to fit in with these people, and yet he’s still an outsider.

“It started up with Judith, after—after Lorie …” Rick explains, more to fill the silence. He still can't look up. Finally, defeated, he sets the towel down. 

Carl hates them for making his father think of her death, but more for making Rick feel anything like shame for his body.

“Dad, let’s go get you another shirt.” He takes the older man by the arm and guides him to the exit.

As they walk away, Pete calls after them, something about coming to the clinic to get checked out. Rick is still too mortified to respond and only nods rigidly, though Carl doubts he’d even heard the question.

 

 

They run into the Andersons as they walk the neighborhood sometimes.

Ever since the party and their very public exit, there’s always a strained kind of energy between the two families.

Carl thinks he sees something in the way Jessie looks at Rick but isn’t sure. And the way _Pete_ looks at Rick, Carl is even less sure about.

He’s definitely certain he doesn’t like Sam.

One day, the boy is riding his bike alongside his parents and falls. Carl doesn’t know how he managed it with training wheels but can’t deny that it happened.

It was only a tumble but the boy is badly shaken up. It’s pitiful and further proof of how ill-equipped these Alexandrians are. Carl looks again to his father for validation on this but finds the man transfixed. Like Jessie, Rick seems to go weak in the knees when Sam hits the ground. He looks like he wants nothing more than to lunge forward and comfort the boy along with her. 

Once the crying starts, it’s like clockwork.  Before Carl looks he already knows.

“Dad.”

Rick turns to his son, then down to where he’s staring.

“Oh,” Rick says.

The other three look up and it feels like the party all over again. At least they don’t have a whole room of people staring this time.

Still, Rick’s face colors. 

Jessie seems to fumble for something. “It’s— it’s okay, Rick. Really. I’m sorry.” She turns to her husband who’s already moving forward.

“Why don’t you come in, Rick?" Pete says. "We’ll get you a change of shirt.”

Rick doesn’t protest as he’s guided through the Andersons’ garage. Carl follows.

A little while later, Jessie is bustling around her kitchen in search of a towel.

Rick’s shirt is open and, although he’s stopped leaking, his chest and stomach are still damp with the creamy residue.

“It’s alright, really,” Rick says and looks more bothered by the trouble he’s caused than by the leak.

Pete comes back holding a shirt but stops in the door, apparently halted by the sight Rick on the stool. His eyes go right to the exposed chest then seem to follow the streaks downward.

Jessie finally finds a cloth and rushes forward, pressing it to Rick’s abs.

“Jessie, I can—“

“It’s really alright, Rick. I just feel so bad about the way we reacted the other night. Let us help you.”

“Yeah, Rick, no need to be embarrassed here.” The tall man is smiling as he steps forward. “I’m a doctor. This is really nothing new to me.”

Rick reaches up to take the shirt from him but just then, Sam walks in. As if the mere sight of the weepy boy flips some switch in Rick, the leaking starts up again.

Rick sighs, looking down at himself.  “Best to wait, I think,” he says, indicating to the shirt Pete is still holding out for him. It’s in good humor but Pete gives him an apologetic wince.

“I’m sorry,” Jessie rushes out, going to her son. “I’ll get him upstairs. Let’s go, sweetie.”

As she herds the boy out of the room, Sam stares back at Rick curiously.

“Never been this bad before,” Rick sighs when they’re left alone. He frowns down at the continuous streams.

Carl and Pete watch him wipe himself with the towel Jessie had left him. He’s careful around the puffy nipples.

Pete fills the silence by explaining something about how mothers’ bodies become conditioned to the sound of a crying child. It’s something about instincts and biology and Carl is barely listening. He just wants Rick to take the shirt so they can go. This Pete has a lot of knowledge but doesn’t sound very confident from the way he fumbles his words when his eyes wander downward.

Carl feels less and less sure about this place. Maybe they’d been better off on the road with their own group, which had fused into more of a family. None of them ever looked at Rick like he was some kind of zoo animal.

When they finally leave, it’s with one of Pete’s too-large shirts and three of Jessie’s old books on breastfeeding for new mothers.

 

 

It isn’t long before everyone learns about Rick’s situation. 

All the mothers flock to him with guidance. Even many of the fathers have something to say. Deanna and Reg are especially supportive.

“You ever thought of binding them?” Deanna offers one day in the Monroes’ expansive living room. “So they won’t leak through your clothes, I mean.” She’d heard of his reoccurring problem.

Rick looks at the older woman then down, embarrassed. “No. Guess I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s alright,” Deanna assures him. “When I was nursing my sons, I leaked all the time. It’s just something that happens. Right, honey?”

“Absolutely!” Reg hoots with an amiable smile that hasn’t left his face since they’d arrived. “Nothing to be ashamed of there, Rick. Just means everything working like it should. Isn’t that right, boys?”

On another couch, Spencer and Aiden rouse when their father addresses them. 

“Yes. It’s…normal,” Aiden, the oldest son, says, dragging his eyes away from the baby latched to Rick’s chest.

They’d been there longer than expected and missed Judith’s feeding time. When the girl started fussing, Rick had tried to excuse himself but Mr. And Mrs. Monroe insisted he stay put, assuring him that his nursing didn’t bother them at all. They hadn’t asked their sons.

When the youngest Monroe doesn’t respond, his older brother nudges him. “Normal, right, Spence?”

Spencer nods, watching as some excess milk spills out of Judith’s mouth and dribbles down Rick’s shaven chest.

The women come in groups and huddle around him while he feeds Judith. Carl will sometimes hear them on the porch. It reminds him of the first camp when all the women—Andrea, Carol, Amy, and Carl’s mother—would wash clothes in the lake or prepare food together. Although Carl had been a child and hadn’t paid much mind to what they said then, he was always comforted by the sounds of their mingling feminine voices and laughter.

“It’s been a while since we’ve had anyone nursing around here,” Shelly Neudermeyer says. “The last one was Jessie with Sam.”

“Yeah, and If you ask me,” Barbara leans in. “She couldn’ve breastfed _that_ one a little less…” 

Rick laughs lightly but seems to be barely listening, more occupied by the girl on his lap as he adjusts her position to one more comfortable. He doesn’t seem bothered that many of the Alexandrian women seem to think of him as one of their own, nor does he seem to notice how some of the men stare curiously from across the street.

Carl understands their curiosity. When he first saw Rick like that, he’d been struck instantly by the sight. It was a side of his father he’d always known on some level but never really considered, certainly never  _seen_ on display like that. Still, Carl knows that Rick is no less of a man. In some ways, Carl even thinks he's  _more_ of a man now.

Unlike the Alexandrian mothers, who never leave the walls, Rick goes out on supply runs and even leads the more dangerous missions. Unlike the men, when he comes back, muddied and scuffed up, he wastes no time in taking up his child and rocking her gently in the same arms that had swung a hatchet down hard on the heads of twenty walkers that same day, and soothe her with soft kisses and a humming voice gone ragged from overuse. Sometimes, Carl will find the father and daughter on the couch, both asleep and still joined, and he'll notice how Rick hadn't even taken off his muddied boots.

It always impresses Carl how fluidly Rick moves between the two sides of himself, the soft and the hard, as if the lines aren’t so defined. 

That duality is mimicked in his body. Although Rick is hard with lean muscle, he’s soft too. Now that he has regular access to a razor, he shaves so it’s less abrasive when Judith feeds. Carl finds he likes the feel of him, and on quiet days, when they nap together on the large bed in Rick’s room, Carl will slide his hand up beneath Rick’s cotton shirt and enjoy the impossible smoothness of his chest and stomach and Rick will hum contentedly.

 

 

Tobin and Carol have been spending more time together. They watch Judith when Glenn and Maggie can’t, and offer Rick all the help he needs. Carl is glad of that. With Daryl gone most days, off hunting or scouting for survivors with Aaron, Rick needs more people looking out for him.

Rick holds meetings at the church sometimes. Most everyone comes. One day, he’s talking about new patrol routes he wants to set up around the perimeter when Judith starts crying.

Tobin is holding her today, though they trade off. In the front row, the large man tries bouncing her on his knee while nodding at Rick to continue.

Rick hesitates a moment, pale irises dilating as they hone in on the girl, but he does go on. 

Carl squeamishly awaits the spots to form on his father’s shirt. When they don’t come, he’s relieved but curious.

Later when they’re home, he catches Rick changing in his room down the hall, and sees the white bandages wrapped around his chest. Rick colors a little when he catches his son watching from the hallway, then quickly dawns another shirt.

  

 

When they finally make it to the infirmary for the check-up, Pete, who’s apparently the only community doctor, maintains a professional curiosity. He asks Rick questions that Carl can only assume are normal procedure, and Rick answers plainly and truthfully. Carl's check-up was first but he'd stayed for his father’s. He’s glad he did; the whole thing feels very cold.

“How often do you need to express them?” Pete asks.

“ ‘Bout twice a day.” Rick shrugs. “More some days.” 

Pete hums and seems to make some note on a clipboard.

“Can you express some now?”

Rick looks to Carl then back to the doctor.

“Well I… I fed Judith just this morning. I don’t think I’ll have much…”

“I see,” Pete says and stares at Rick’s chest a moment before returning to his clipboard.

Carl recognizes the dampened look that crosses his father’s face.

“Well, I could…I could try,” Rick offers. 

Pete looks up. Rick lifts his shirt, brings a hand to one nipple and pinches with his thumb and forefinger. He tries for a while but nothing comes.

Reluctantly, Rick drops his shirt. “Well, I…never been real good at it,” Rick admits and Carl puts a hand on his shoulder. What he wants to do is rub his back and tell him he does fine, but Pete is there watching, and he isn't comfortable around the man.

“Hm,” Pete says, and seems to make another note. “Let me ask you, Rick, does it uh…get sore?”

Rick frowns at the doctor in question.

“When you don’t express milk for a while,” Pete clarifies, clearing his throat. “Does it start to get uncomfortable?”

“Oh,” Rick says. “Yeah. I can go a while but it starts to hurt a little.”

“Well the next time you come in, I’ll ask you not to feed Judith beforehand. Do you think you can handle that?”

Rick nods. “If it’s in the mornin’, I can. I’ll just give her some formula.”

“Do you feed her formula regularly?”

“No, no. Just when I can’t be there or I’m...empty. Thought I should try to wean her off me for a while, but now that I’m… producing again, I don’t think I need to.”

“That’s good, Rick. That's good. I only recommend formula for…mothers who have trouble nursing, but it’s always better to breastfeed.”

“I know,” Rick says. “When Carl was born, my wife—Lorie— she said it’s how the baby got the mother’s immunities. With Carl she’d…” His voice breaks off. Carl does rub his back then. “Well, she always said that anyway.” Rick clears his throat, looking down.

Pete gives him a moment before speaking again “That’s good, Rick. That’s good.” He pats Rick’s knee gently. “She was very right.”

Rick nods.

“Alright. Last thing,” Pete says. “When’s the last time you got that prostate checked?”

Rick turns to Carl then back to the doctor, looking a little hesitant. “Been some time,” he says, a little stiffly.

“Well, you’re in luck. I’m all freed up next Wednesday. How ‘bout we get everything knocked out then?”

“Alright.” Carl doesn’t know if it’s relief he sees on his father’s face.

“You probably won’t want to be here for that, sport,” Pete says to Carl, then cracks a smile and elbows him. 

Carl has no idea what he’s talking about.

On their way out, they stop at the door. “I’ll see you next week then, alright? You notice any drastic change in production or viscosity, you tell me.” He shakes Rick's hand—for longer than necessary, Carl thinks. Rick thanks the doctor and they finally leave.

Later, Carl finds Carol and asks her about it. After she tells him, she bursts out laughing like Carl has something on his face.

“It’s completely normal,” she assures him. “And it’s actually a good thing to get checked. You’ll have to have yours checked too one day. It’s probably just a little uncomfortable for your father is all. Pete too.”

Carl feels a little better. Still, he didn’t think that Pete looked all that uncomfortable about it. 

 

  

Carl doesn’t accompany his father the next appointment but waits outside the infirmary.

“And I mean it,” Pete says as the two men emerge. “We expect you two over for Jessie's pot roast tonight. We gotta keep you nice and fed so you can keep producing for that little girl of yours.” He smiles broadly and Rick nods, coloring again. Carl hates how often he does that lately. 

Rick thanks him, and Carl is glad to be leaving. As they walk away, he glances back and sees Pete smiling and waving them off.

Everyone seems to want to feed Rick.

It isn’t unusual that Carol will come around baring some new dish for them, but she isn’t the only one. Deanna stops by insisting that Rick take some more food from the pantry to keep with him. And at least two or three times a week, one of the Alexandrian families will invite them over for dinner.

Rick looks healthier and more well-rested than Carl can remember seeing him. He makes more milk than ever and Carl forgets that they were ever trying to wean Judith off of him.

At one point, Pete had offered Rick pills to help boost his milk production. Rick had declined good-naturedly.

“That’s alright,” he’d said smiling. “I think I make enough as it is.” It’s true. They hardly need the formula anymore and Carl thinks that Rick’s already muscled chest has been looking fuller lately.

Carl had been relieved that his father turned down the pills and is even looking forward to the day when Judith finally doesn’t need him. As much as Carl appreciates this unique facet of his father’s body, he isn’t sure he likes how everyone else seems to be appreciating it too.

 

 

One day, Carl goes to the Andersons' and finds Rick in the kitchen with Pete and Jessie.

His shirt is hiked up, the bandages are off, and Carl guesses from the streams of milk flowing freely from his exposed nipples, that Sam must’ve passed through not long ago.

Rick is sandwiched between the husband and wife. At his back, Pete reaches around, fingering one of the leaking nubs while Jessie, in front, works the other.

If the sight itself wasn’t arresting enough, what the pair are saying to his father in eager hushed voices has Carl’s breath caught in his chest.

“That’s it…” Jessie says. “That’s it. Isn’t that better?” Her eyes are glued to him as her fingers work.

“You can’t even look at him without filling up, can you?” Pete says into Rick’s ear. “Want to feed my boy your milk, Rick? Want him to suck on your aching tits?”

Rick is spilling all over himself. Amidst the encouraging purrs of the married couple, Carl can hear Rick’s own sounds of a mixture of pain and intense relief. His head falls back on Pete’s shoulder. One hand covers his flushed face while the other rests on the back of Jessie’s head as the woman seems ever so slowly to lean down.

Carl must’ve made a sound because pale blue eyes crack open and roll toward the doorway. Seeing his son at last, Rick’s hand falls away from his face and he tries to form words. If he’d managed anything, Carl is storming out of the house before he can catch it.

 

 

“You can’t just let people suck on your tits like that, Dad!” Carl shouts later in their own kitchen.

“ _Carl!_ ” Rick gapes at his son. “You don’t…you don’t talk like that. And…they were only tryin' to help.”

“No, they weren’t, Dad. They just want to make you squirt milk. They get off on you, Dad. You’re like a fetish to them.”

Rick’s chest rises and falls steeply as he absorbs the comment. “Car-Carl, how…where did you…”

Carl had been spending a lot of time with the Andersons' _other_ son, Ron, and had picked up a few terms.

“You’re so eager to make this work, you want to trust everyone, but you don’t see what I see!”

“Carl—”

“You can’t trust these people, Dad. They aren’t like us—they aren’t family! _We’re_ the only ones you can trust!”

It doesn’t end well. Rick is seething with hurt and disappointment. Carl doesn’t know which is worse. The teen storms out of the house and doesn’t return for the rest of the night. 

“What do you make of all this?” Carl asks Michonne sometime later as they sit on the curb. On a break in her daily rounds, she's still in uniform.

“I think this is the safest we’ve been in a long time,” she says after some thought. “We’re fed. We’re protected. I think your father is trying to do what’s best for you and your sister.”

Carl frowns.

“Look, I know this place is weird. These people are…” She glances dryly around the street of bright houses and brighter inhabitants. “I think it would help your father if you try to make this work.”

Reluctantly Carl nods.

 

 

Carl likes hanging out with Ron because he’s one of the few people in Alexandria who doesn’t seem to care one way or another what Rick’s nipples can do.

“So your dad’s got milk coming out of his tits?” The teen had said one day early on, as they sat in the attic of one of the abandoned houses. “Huh.” Then he went back to his magazine and that had been the end of it.

Carl is strangely comforted by Ron’s disinterest in his father, glad at least that he won’t have to worry about one day walking in on his friend hiking up his father’s shirt and going at him like a Walker on flesh.

 

 

Rick’s check-ups with Doctor Pete are regular, but really Rick visits much of Alexandria. As the leader of the new group, many people demand his time. 

Another day, Carl is looking for his father and finds him propped up on Reg’s desk with the older man’s face buried in his open shirt. Beneath Rick are blueprints, scattered and forgotten as if, halfway through the discussion, Reg had found Rick far more interesting. The old pervert had probably said he was thirsty and Rick, the hopeless nurturer that he is, likely started leaking on the spot.

“Carl?” Rick says, finally spotting him in the doorway.

“Oh! Carl. Hello.” The older man pulls away from Rick’s chest and smiles at the unexpected intruder, smearing his wrist across his lips.

Dazedly, Rick climbs down from the table. 

“We’ll finish hashing out the details on this later,” Reg says. Rick gives a fast smile and nods. It’s with a tinge of disappointment that the old man watches Rick button up his shirt and leave with Carl.

 

 

Carl has to wonder what Daryl would think about all this.

Restless within the walls, the archer is more often out scouting with Aaron or scavenging. When he does comes back, he always has something for Rick—a rodent or a token of some kind.  Rick always accepts it, smiling, grateful.  Bringing Rick things seems to please Daryl. Carl thinks he likes it too. He likes the idea of his father being provided for.

“Daryl’s not gonna like you letting everybody suck on you like that.”

It’s a familiar, trodden argument now but Carl is pent up with frustration and needs to work it off.

“They’re just bein’ nice,” Rick grouses, without looking up from the stew he’s stirring over the stovetop. “You know it hurts when I get full. And Judith doesn’t feed as much... They’re just helpin’ relieve the pressure is all. I don’t mind it. And anyway, we’re all family here.”

Carl sets down the plate—a little too roughly. “You don’t have to go to them, Dad. You can ask _me_. _I’ll_ help you. I already told you I would!”

“I know that, Carl, but…” 

“But what? Don’t say I’m too old because—“

“No, Carl. It’s not that. I just…I don’t think it’s a good idea.” He looks down.

Of course. Ever since the prison, something had changed between them. Rick had been slowly growing more distant. It's in small ways but Carl feels it. It's in the way Rick pulls away when Carl touches him; it's those occasional nights when Carl makes his way to Rick's bed and Rick will say he's "too sore" when Carl tries to slide a hand up his shirt. Before, he'd never minded when Carl would run his hands over him and even seemed to like it when he soothed his over-worked nipples with his fingers and lips. The most telling thing is that Rick never asks Carl for help to express his milk. Even when it gets bad. 

It’s unspoken between them, but Carl knows when everything changed. In that big white house on that vacant street after the fall of the prison, Carl had taken it too far, taken it some place he shouldn't have. Rick never explained it. Carl had to figure it out on his own. Coming here had been the biggest lesson. Walking through Alexandria is like walking through an echo of the old world. Here, Carl watches the sons and fathers together—Ron and Pete, the Monroes—and knows that he and Rick are _not_ that. Somewhere, they’d become something else. From the way Rick has been acting, he must see it too.

Still, it’s hard to accept that Rick would let these strangers touch him like that and not his own son. Carl _loves_ Rick. The Andersons don’t love Rick. The Monroes don’t love Rick. No one feels for Rick the way Carl does. He would never use Rick, never treat him like a fetish. He only wants—only ever wanted—Rick to be happy and safe. 

As he looks into the eyes of the most important person in his life, Carl tries to say all this but it doesn’t come out like he wants. He doesn’t know how to put to words what he feels. It's just too big.

So Rick turns back to the stove. “That’s enough tonight, Carl.”

 

 

As the rift grows in the Grimes household, everyone else seems to be coming together.

Glenn and Maggie are talking about trying for a baby. Abraham and Sasha have been spending a lot of time together. Even the Alexandrians are growing closer. 

“My parents used to fight all the time. It got really bad. But lately, it’s a lot better. My dad pretty much stopped drinking. My mom’s happier. She made like four metal sculptures last month. They go on dates now _. Dates._ This may sound fucking weird but I feel like your dad’s tits saved my parent’s marriage.”

Without a word, Carl gets up to leave.

“Maybe there’s something in the milk,” Ron calls after him.

“Fuck you.” Carl doesn’t look back.

“Christ, you’re grumpy. Maybe you oughta try some!”

Carl can still hear Ron laughing as he slams the door to the vacant house and strides back home.

He’s done. If Rick won’t listen to reason, Carl will leave. Simple as that. He doesn't have to stay in this place with these sick, backward people. He has no ties to them. He’s leaving whether his father is with him or not. Rick will have to make a choice—his new family or his _real_ family.

Carl bursts through the front door. “Dad!”

“Carl!” 

The teen follows the voice upstairs.

He finds his father and sister on the floor in Judith’s room. Rick is sprawled on his stomach propped on his elbows across from Judith. From the look of the scattered toys between them, Carl guesses they were playing.

“Dad, we need to—“

“Wait, wait,” Rick says excitedly and holds up a hand to quiet him. “Listen, listen.” He turns to Judith. “Baby, can you say it again? Can you say ‘Daddy?’ “

There’s a pause as the girl seems more occupied with the small truck in her hand. After tapping it on the ground a few times she finally says, “Da…Daddy.”

Both Carl and Rick yelp. 

“ _Yes_ , sweetie! _Yes!_ ” Rick cries out laughing. He leans forward to kiss her and they both giggle. Rick beams up at his son.

Carl feels himself pulled downward. Before he knows what's happened, he too is sprawled on the floor. He embraces his sister, kissing her on the head and laughing along with them both.

Rick encourages her to say it again and again, flashing big blue eyes at his son after each success. He looks like he could do this all day. As Carl watches the man, who looks happier and healthier than he’s ever seen him, Carl thinks he too could stay there on the floor like that. And they do. 

The three play and laugh together until the sun goes down.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another super long one for you guys. I almost made the first part its own chapter but it would've been too short. I hope it doesn't feel disjointed this way. 
> 
> Thank you so much for the comments and support. I love hearing what you guys think. 
> 
> I'm back in classes so there may be a longer delay before the next chapter. Thanks for sticking around and I hope you enjoyed!


	5. Hilltop

  
It’s immediately clear that Daryl doesn’t like him.

Carl had heard about the failed run and the sunken truck-load of supplies, but he isn’t sure if that’s the whole reason.

“Somethin’ interesting?” Daryl growls, gripping his crossbow.

Jesus doesn’t take his eyes off the man in the next room. “It’s beautiful,” he says at last. Daryl frowns at him.

Carl too is taken aback by the response. He turns to where Jesus is looking.

In the living room, Carl’s father is rocking gently where he stands. From the kitchen, Carl can make out the low encouraging sounds he makes. One large hand comes up to smooth the back of a golden blond head. Judith must have tugged because Rick makes a soft, startled sound and brunette curls tumble forward. Rick waits patiently for her to get her fill of him so he can join them.

The scene is nothing new to Carl, but he’s never heard it described the way Jesus did.

As if sensing the eyes on him, Rick glances up and Carl is met with radiant blue. Rick flashes his son a brief smile before turning his attention back to Judith in his arms.

Carl rolls the word around in his head once more. Beautiful.

 

 

Weeks later, the word still drifts back to him sometimes.

On the other side of the crowded study, Carl’s father is sweating. They all are. With Rick, it’s more than the heat though. The long drive to Hilltop is too much to ask of a toddler so they had to leave Judith behind. Carl knows that Rick is feeling her absence. Across the room, Carl catches the occasional bob of his Adam’s Apple, and notes the breaths that have grown steadily shallower since they’d set out that morning. He’s full, Carl thinks.

Carl turns his focus again to the discussion filling the room.

Gregory isn’t like Jesus, they all very quickly found out. In fact, he’s like no one Carl has met before. Although they’ve been coming here for weeks now, the Hilltop leader still squints at Carl like he doesn’t recognize him.

“Why don’t y’all go on and get cleaned up,” Gregory had said at the door. His gaze floated over the group, passing over Carl in a way that left the young man feeling completely unseen. Then the steely eyes landed on Rick. “Hard to keep this place _…clean.”_

 _Clean._ The way he'd said it seemed to suggest they were the kind of dirty that couldn't easily be washed off. What still sticks with Carl though is how, as he'd said it, the man's eyes dipped down between the flaps of Rick's jacket. From the way Rick's jaw had tightened, Carl thinks he didn't miss it either.

Carl isn’t sure who told Gregory about Rick. As accepting and almost _awed_ as Jesus seems by the whole thing, Carl doubts it was him. Maybe it was the doctor then, who’d once lent Rick bandages to help the leaking. It was that first day, after Jesus had announced to his people the news of the car explosion and the settlers they lost. There was a burst of emotion, wails of sobs filled the central clearing of the settlement, and that had been it for Rick’s shirt. He’d even leaked through his jacket. That was when the doctor, Harlan, had pulled Rick aside. At the time, Carl had been grateful for the man’s kindness and discretion, but now as Gregory’s shrewd eyes drift down Rick’s chest as if trying to see through the layers of cotton, the teen wonders if the doctor was not as discreet as he’d thought.

If Rick notices Gregory’s shifting attention throughout the meeting, he doesn’t show it, but sits mostly silent and observes the room erupting around him.

It’s as messy as always: Maggie is losing patience, Abraham is blunt, Daryl is hostile, and Jesus is just trying to keep everyone calm.

Although Rick mostly hangs back allowing Maggie to take the lead, Carl notices how Gregory’s keen grey eyes will fix on him occasionally. When Rick does speak up, Carl thinks he catches a distasteful twitch beneath the mustache.

“Sounds like you need us,” Rick says at one point, breaking through the furor of the room. Everyone falls quiet. Gregory’s mustache twitches.

“Oh, we need _you_?” The Hilltop leader huffs. “Jesus already told me y’all are running low on supplies. You need us is more like it.” He says this to Maggie, and bares his teeth at the woman in what might be a smile.

Carl has also noticed that when Rick speaks, it’s Maggie to whom Gregory responds.

“A little low on medicine maybe,” Rick treads on. “But we have guns, and plenty of manpower. And from the sounds of it, y’all got another settlement on your backs causin’ problems. Pickin’ off your people.”

Begrudgingly, Gregory turns his attention back to Rick. “ _Medicine_ ,” he echoes, and his eyes flick down again. Carl’s fists tighten. “I’m sure. And how do we know we can trust your group? How do we know you’ll keep up your end of the deal when you get your medicine?” He asks Rick directly now.

“I told you, Gregory,” Jesus speaks up. “I vouch for them. They’re good people.”

“Hush, Jesus,” Gregory chides. “I know you always want to see the good in people, but I’m sure you can all understand how I might be a little suspicious of…outsiders. I have to be.” He tucks his thumbs in his belt, looking proud of the responsibility.

“Well,” Rick says and runs his tongue over his teeth. “You tell us what sort of people you’re tryin’ to avoid and we’ll tell you if we’re them.” Carl’s heart leaps at the sharpness of his tone.

After a tense moment in which the two leaders only stare at one another, Gregory rises up and comes around the desk. Carl thinks he’ll get in Rick’s face then, thinks he’ll have to step in, but Gregory stops short as if he doesn’t want to get too near the other leader. Then his lip curls back. “The _unnatural_ sort,” he says at last, and Carl has never been so incensed by a single word.

The teen is propelled forward at once but is stopped when a hand presses his chest.

“Wait,” Jesus says beside him.

“Fuck this, Rick. We don’t need’em. We got plenty,” Daryl says.

“No! Listen!” Jesus pleads, holding up his hands. “Gregory, these people were kind to me. They could’ve killed me. They didn’t. They helped bring back our people.”

“Hush up now, Jesus. We’re only talking,” Gregory says in a voice somehow smooth and prickly at once. “Isn’t that right, Rick?”

Rick holds his eyes.

Finally, Gregory turns to Maggie. “I think that’s enough talking for one day. One crate of sorghum. That’s all. Can’t spare any more than that.” As he watches the man tuck his thumbs back into his belt beneath a round gut, Carl doubts that somehow.

 

 

As they’re leaving, Jesus apologizes for Gregory. It isn’t the first time and won’t be the last, Carl expects. They’ll keep meeting with Hilltop until they can hash out a regular trade deal.

In the RV, the air is heavy with defeat. Like always, it feels like they gave more than they got and Carl doesn’t know how his father tolerates it.

“I know his kind.” Maggie says. “Had to deal with more than a few men like that.”

“What, creeps?” Glenn offers.

“Assholes,” Daryl adds.

“Weasel-faced bureaucrats?” Abraham chimes in.

Rick shakes his head at the ground, and Carl thinks he catches the faintest smile. “We’ve dealt with worse,” he says and lifts his shirt to adjust his bindings. He’s more careful not to forget them when they go to Hilltop now. “Let’s just do what we gotta do. We need that medicine. Hey,” He puts his hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “You did good. We’ll get more next time,” he assures her.

Maggie nods back to him.

As they ride back, Carl watches his father.

 

 

  
“What did you mean by ‘men like that?’ ” Carl asks later.

Maggie looks up at him a little surprised. They’re back in Alexandria. Carl had been waiting for a moment alone with her.

“Who, Gregory?”

Carl nods. He’s been trying to figure out just what it is about the man that’s been tugging at him.

“Yeah,” Maggie says. “Had to deal with a lot of men like that when I helped my father with his patients. Men who always thought they knew better, that they could talk down to me like I was their secretary or somethin’. Gregory’s like that.”

“He talks down to you?” Carl asks.

“He did at first. Not so much anymore. He’s gettin’ it now.”

Carl stares at the ground, considering how Gregory seems to speak almost exclusively to Maggie now, even when others address him.

“This about your father?” Maggie asks suddenly.

Carl doesn’t respond.

The woman eyes him a moment. “I wouldn’t worry about him,” she says. "Rick can handle himself.”

Carl nods distractedly.

He doesn’t stop worrying about it. It’s one thing for people to have an interest in his father but he’s not used to people disregarding him or treating him like he’s something… _less._ The way Gregory looks at Rick is somehow worse than the way he looks _through_ the rest of them. Although Carl isn’t sure why, he knows it has something to do with Rick’s body.

 

 

  
Later, Carol is less delicate about it.

“Gregory is a bigot pig with very old ideas,” she says, setting up another block of wood and swinging the axe down smoothly. “He reminds me a little of my husband actually.”

Carl vaguely remembers the man. He has hazy visions of a roundish, lumbering figure hanging idly around the camp while the women worked and the men went out scavenging. Carl doesn’t think he ever spoke to the man but distinctly remembers disliking him. It’s strange hearing Carol talk about him now when he’s never heard her bring him up before.

“Ed didn’t like women who didn't fit his ideas of what women should be,” she continues, tossing the chopped wood with the rest in the pile. “Gregory’s like that. The kind of man who wears his manhood like a badge. He thinks it gives him some kind of authority or something. It’s why he used to talk to Maggie like that. It’s why it’s taking him so long to agree to a fair deal with us. If we were all old white men, we’d have had this deal in the bag that first meeting. He’s just a man stuck in the past. Ideas like that don’t last long out here,” She says, setting up another block. “You’ll see.” She swings the axe.

Carl takes this in and thinks it makes sense mostly. Still, something doesn’t add up. “But what does that have to do with my dad?” he asks finally. Carol kept talking about how Gregory treated _women,_ but he treats Rick much worse than he ever treated Maggie.

Carol considers him a while before answering. “Gregory has… black and white ideas about men and women. To him, a man gives orders and sits at a big mahogany desk drinking old scotch. And a woman follows his orders and brings him that scotch. It’s…” She must see that Carl isn’t following. “To Gregory,” she begins again. “A man is one thing and a woman is another. And Rick…Well,” She seems to consider this a moment as the axe settles at her side. “Your father is something else.” She smiles.

 

 

  
Carl thinks on it later as he watches his father cleaning up after Judith. She eats some food now but Rick still nurses her when he can. Carl thinks that Rick likes that she still needs him that way.

Rick wipes a cloth up his stomach and over his chest where some milk had spilled. “Carl, can you hand me that?” He holds out his hand and Carl mechanically tosses him a dry cloth.

He watches his father finish drying himself, careful on his tender chest.

On long days apart like this, Rick seems to crave Judith’s nearness as much as she craves his, and he’ll let her feed on him long after he’s dried up and gone all bruised and puffy. As Carl regards the over-used nubs peeking out from between the flaps of shirt, he can’t stop thinking of a pair of grey eyes that also stared at Rick’s chest but with a strange mix of fascination and disgust.

Before Carl even finishes the thought, it’s out of his mouth. “I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

Rick blinks over at him. “What?”

“Gregory. The way he looks at you. The way he talks to you. I don’t like it.”

Rick stares for a moment, then begins buttoning up his shirt. “How’s that?”

“Like…” Carl licks his lips, arranging his thoughts. “Like you’re not a man.”

Rick’s brow appears to twitch but he remains focused on the last of his buttons. “Carl, Gregory’s just…He’s…”

“A bigot pig.”

“ _Carl?_ ”

“It’s because you can nurse,” Carl says. “Like a woman. He treats you like you’re weak.” It’s ridiculous when Carl thinks about it. The idea that Rick would be somehow less capable because he could do more than what most men could.

“Carl, what are you—”

“Maggie and Carol told me that’s why he’s like that with you.”

“Maggie— _Carol?_ ”

“And Daryl’s right. We don’t need him. We should just make the deal. We’re not his…secretaries. We shouldn’t have to run errands for him, bring him his… _s-scotch_.”

“What?”

“Jesus is already with us on this.”

“Carl, stop.”

“We don’t have to take this, Dad. We can just—

 _“Stop.”_ The look Rick gives him makes Carl’s voice catch in his throat. “Whatever you’re thinkin’, it’s…it’s not that simple,” Rick says, voice softening again. "We need to work together. Jesus is right. Our communities can help each other. We can’t just take and... _kill_ when things get hard. That’s the old way. If we want to build somethin’ good here, we gotta do it right. We can settle this with diplomacy, like Deanna said. What you’re talkin’ about, it…doesn’t bother me.” Rick looks like he wants to say more, but Judith starts crying in the next room.

“Just…” Rick says, moving toward the door. “Just trust me.”

 

 

  
It happens again. This time Carl doesn’t try to interfere.

Gregory gets in Rick’s face, looks like he really might spit on him.

Rick takes it as usual, with his jaw set. For a moment Carl feels the rage overtaking him again, but then something shifts. As he watches, he thinks there’s something in the way Rick doesn’t rise to the other man, doesn’t posture. Like he has nothing to prove to him, Carl realizes.

But Gregory seems only takes it as another show of Rick’s weakness. He turns again to Maggie. “Alright. We’ll talk about a deal. Nothing big. We’ll start small.”

As they’re leaving, Carl is still looking at his father. For the first time that they’re leaving the large manner, he doesn’t feel frustrated and angry and like they’ve wasted their time, but he feels oddly calm. He’s seen Gregory’s posturing and for the first time recognizes it for what it is—weakness. Furthermore, he _sees_ Rick and feels like he finally understands. That silence and restraint that Carl himself had mistaken for weakness has a true power in it.

Carl decides then that he won’t allow himself to lose sight of that quiet strength again. He won’t drag it through the mud. He’ll trust his father.

On their way out, they’re eyes meet for a moment and Rick gives his son a gentle, weary smile.

Jesus’ word floats back to him.

Beautiful.

 

 

 

Carl thinks he must not be alone in the way he feels about Gregory because on their next visit, some settlers arrive and stab the leader in the gut.

As the only ones with guns, the Alexandrians take care of it pretty quickly. Gregory is more open to a fair deal after that. Unfortunately, he was carried off before he got a chance to see what quick work Rick made of those men. Once more, he’ll only speak to Maggie, but at least they have a real deal. And for once, Hilltop is at their mercy.

 

 

  
He’d flipped again between the hard and the soft. The survivor and the nurturer. Carl thinks that by now he should be used to how deftly his father moves between the two reigning sides of himself, but it still surprises him sometimes. From the looks of it, the _Saviors_ weren’t ready for it either.

Rick hadn’t even gotten his boots off. They’re muddy and scuffed like the rest of him. There’s some blood on his clothes. Carl reaches down and lifts one limp and heavy boot off the armrest to pull at the heel.

The team had just gotten back a little while ago and Rick fell asleep instantly. From the way Jesus spoke about the group that had been terrorizing their settlement, Carl had thought they’d have a much bigger challenge, but Rick and the group were only gone for half the day. Still, the man is exhausted now.

Dreamily Rick’s eyes crack open. “Carl,” He rasps, wetting his dry mouth. “Carl, it…it’s fine.” He says but makes no move to intervene as his son slides off the first boot.

Rick’s legs are long and heavy with lean muscle. Structurally there’s a slight outward curve to them that wasn’t passed down to Carl. He’d never really given the feature much thought until he overheard some people talking about it around Alexandria when they first arrived. “Those bowlegs,” someone had said as Rick made his rounds. And ever since then Carl can’t help thinking of them that way when he watches his father coming or going any place. Carl guesses he probably always noticed his father’s particular shape and his way of moving. It just seemed right on Rick though.

After dislodging the second boot, Carl lays the sturdy leg back down on the couch. Rick is mostly asleep but makes gruff, dreamy sounds. The way he keeps swallowing lets Carl know he’s thirsty.

As he watches him dozing a moment more, he regards the muddied, scuffed jeans, the scraped and calloused knuckles, and the faint scars peppered across every bare scrap of skin, Carl wonders how anyone could think Rick was anything but a man.

Then his eyes follow the tumble of brown curls, the golden brown eyelashes fanning out from pinkish lids, the pillowy lips, and finally down to the gentle swell of his chest as he breaths soft and content.

Dimly Jesus’ word floats back to him as it does from time to time. Carl lets it linger then goes to get a glass of water to set beside Rick for when he wakes up.

He’ll need to get his strength up again. They’re heading back to Hilltop tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summer is here! I get to write!
> 
> Thanks for sticking around guys. Just so you know. I have no intention of abandoning this story. I love the comments and encouragement. Just think, if you guys hadn't suggested I try to explore Rick lactating, so much of this wouldn't have happened XD (That's right. Shifting the blame). This was supposed to be the Saviors chapter but I kept thinking of fun things that could happen before then so just give it maybe a couple more chapters for those who are waiting for that. 
> 
> Thank you guys so much for the awesome support!


	6. Stories From Alexandria: Sam

Sam’s been coming around.

Used to be, he only ever came out with his parents. Carl remembers the small blonde figure ever peaking out from behind Jessie’s hip.

It took a few months before Sam’s suspicion finally waned and he built up the courage to venture over to their side of Alexandria. At first the child just observed them from his training bike as they carried out their normal routines. Carl guessed Sam wasn’t used to seeing people so active. The Alexandrians seem to consider it a wasted day if large chunks of it aren’t spent lounging around shady patios and chatting over fences. Carl can’t blame the kid for seeking out more stimulating company. Still, he wishes Sam’s interest in their little group wasn’t so focused on one member in particular.

For weeks after that welcome party when Rick had soaked his shirt at the sight of the blotchy-faced and blubbering child, Carl would catch a pair of shiny, round eyes following them curiously around the settlement. Carl had grown used to their silent spectator, and even though he didn't mind it as long the boy kept to his wary distance. Lately, however, Sam has gotten bolder.

It’s every day now that he comes around and Carl wonders where that frightened little boy all but fastened to his mother’s hip went. Now Carl sees him sitting in Carol's kitchen, watching the woman while she bakes, or laughing in the yard with Glenn and Michonne, or even staring shyly at Maggie on the porch swing. Sam stays clear of Daryl though, who Carl suspects still scares him. 

Of everyone in their group, Sam seems most interested in Rick.

On days when the heat isn’t so bad and a cool breeze rolls through the Alexandria streets like a gentle hand brushing through your hair, Rick will nurse Judith on the porch. On the outer perimeter of the lawn, Sam will hover watching. 

The Alexandrian women still come around sometimes to huddle like hens around the nursing father, but most everyone has gotten used to their new neighbor and his unusual ability. It’s mostly just Sam who lingers now.

One day, Carl looks out the window and sees Sam on the step, his bike abandoned and forgotten on the sidewalk. The two are talking as Rick cradles Judith’s head to one breast. The sight of them like that seems oddly familiar to Carl and it makes his stomach feel strange.

“He’s just curious,” Rick says when Carl brings it up. 

Carl guesses that makes sense. Still, Sam only seems to grow more curious with time, and before Carl can figure out what happened, the boy has moved beyond the lawn and the porch, and has become a fixture in their home.

 

 

“Where’s your mom?” Carl asks one day as the three of them sit around the living room. He’d been sitting there quietly for a while when he was struck by the routineness of the scene.

Sam pulls his eyes off Rick, who has just laid Judith down for her nap and is now squeezing the contents of a small tube onto his fingers.“Home,” Sam says, then turns back to Rick, who has now started gently rubbing the cream on his swollen nipples.

“And,” Carl says after a moment, feeling suddenly exasperated. “Shouldn’t you be too?”

_“Carl,”_  Rick says. While his tone is firm, the teen catches the humoring glint in his weary eyes.

Resigning himself, Carl settles back in his seat. He knows he shouldn’t be rude to the sheltered boy. Sam is only curious, after all.

“Does it hurt?” Sam asks Rick, as if Carl hadn’t said anything.

“Uh,” Rick considers the question. “Not…not really. A little sometimes. Mostly just gets raw when she goes for a while. It’s not too bad though. I’m used to it now.” He smiles to assure the boy, but Sam still looks concerned. He frowns from one puffy, flushed bud to the other. Then, without a word, he turns and leaves the room.

Carl stares after him, confused. Sam’s been there enough times to know his way around the house, but it still sparks something territorial in Carl to see him roaming around so freely. He looks questioningly to his father, who doesn’t seem to notice as he continues tending to himself.

A short time later, Sam returns with something in his hand and takes his place in front of Rick. Without a word, he presses the object to one of Rick’s exposed nipples.

Rick gasps and Carl bolts upright in his chair as if the man had just been stabbed. Slowly, he realizes what's happening.

Sam’s small hand carefully glides an ice cube over Rick’s inflamed skin, while his large, blue eyes watching the man closely. After a pause, Rick releases a breathy laugh. He’s startled but not upset.

“Is that better?” Sam asks seriously.

Warmed by Rick’s skin, the ice cube is already melting rapidly, forming rivulets that glide down Rick’s chest and abdomen.

Rick’s breathing is jerky as he gets accustomed to the cold on his bare skin. Finally, he places his hand over Sam’s. “That’s…that’s better, Sam. Thank you. That’s real thoughtful of you.” Sam lets Rick take the ice from him and backs away again to watch with that same curious concern. 

Carl closes his dry mouth. It takes time to settle back into his seat again.

As if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, Rick carries on talking good-naturedly, telling stories and answering Sam’s questions.

Either to appease Sam or because it really does soothe him, Rick continues using the ice cube on himself. All the while he's speaking, he glides it over his stiff nipples with methodic slowness, alternating sides until it dissolves to a pebble.

Sam seems to get away with a lot.

Carl thinks on it one night as he lay in bed. 

It’s hard to imagine Rick letting anyone else touch him that way. He’d probably holler at Carl if the teen just came up and put an ice cube on him like that.

He turns on his side.

How would it be if Carl and not Sam had been the one rubbing ice in slow circles around Rick’s sore nipples? Soothing him, making his breath hike and shudder like that? Hadn’t Carl always cared about how raw Rick got after nursing Judith? Before they’d gotten their hands on a cream for it, hadn’t Carl often thought up ways he might ease his father’s discomfort?

Carl remembers how Rick had gasped when the ice touched his skin. It was a sharp and high-pitched sound and not unpleasant. In an instant, every visible patch of the man’s skin was covered in a fine layer of delicate goosebumps. Carl flips the blankets off of himself, suddenly feeling very warm.

Sam has taken to following Rick around town as the man carries out his odd errands, asking questions and helping when he can. Sam likes to help Rick, Carl notices. In the yard, the boy hands Rick damp clothes from the basket and Rick hangs them over the line to dry. Through the window, Carl sees Rick smiling gratefully at the boy as the gold of the setting sun makes his curls blaze. Once more, the sight of them gives Carl that strange feeling in his gut and the fleeting sense of having seen it before. The feeling has been happening more and more lately. He pushes it down until it’s gone.

It’s strange to see Rick and Sam this way now. Carl remembers how, when they’d first arrived, Rick could hardly stand to look at Sam without ruining his shirts. It’s not so bad now that he wraps regularly. It also helps that Sam isn’t always blubbering like a baby anymore. Carl wonders if hanging around Rick so much is doing the sensitive child some good.

Sam’s parents must be thinking the same thing. Pete and Jessie don’t seem to mind that their youngest has been spending so much time around the new group. They even leave Sam with them when they want a night to themselves or when they go out beyond the wall. They’ve started going on small runs together. Some kind of “date” thing, Ron had told him once, though Carl can’t see anything romantic about supply runs. These Alexandrians still confuse him sometimes.

 

 

Sam doesn’t do a lot of talking when he’s there. He mostly just listens to Rick and occasionally interjecting with a soft-spoken question. As he's setting the dinner table for four, Carl hears the small almost inaudible voice in the next room and wonders if his own voice had ever sounded so girlish.

He overhears his father too as the man tells stories and imparts little lessons to the child, and Carl can’t help clinging to the sound. Rick has a tone he takes with Sam, similar to the one he uses with Judith. He’d almost completely abandoned it with Carl now. Carl isn’t sure when it happened, but somewhere in the last couple of years Rick had started using his more natural voice with him. It’s lower, sterner. True, it may not be as rough or deep as the voice he uses with strangers and outsiders, and different too from the one he uses with the group, but still. It’s not the same as that soft, placating tone he remembers from when he was a boy, the same one he now uses with Sam.

“It is good?” Rick asks over the table.

Sam nods vigorously as he finishes chewing. “It’s good. Thank you.”

Rick smiles warmly then turns to Carl. “Can you pass the rolls, Carl?” He asks, lower, sterner.

Carl nods stiffly and tries not to let the sting show as he passes the bowl of warm bread to his father.

 

Rick is leaving the pantry, trailed closely by Sam. From the attic of an abandoned house across the street, Carl watches as a single can falls from Rick’s grocery bag. Sam is quick to spot it. He picks it up and runs to return it to Rick, who stops and looks surprised by the gesture. Even from the distance, Carl knows Rick is rewarding the boy with a warm smile.

Carl thinks Rick could pick up his own cans.

He could hang his own laundry too for that matter. He’s managed well enough on his own without the help of some weepy Alexandrian boy. Anyway, if he really wanted the help, he could as one of them. Daryl would be glad to lend a hand, Michonne too. Carl could get Rick ice if he wanted it that badly.

“What do you want me to do?” Ron asks, turning the page of this comic book where he lounges on a mat by the wall. 

Carl worries at his lip. “I dunno. He doesn’t have like a… a—” he grasps for a word from a long-gone era. “—a  _hobby,_  or something?”

“A  _hobby?”_ Ron lifts his head to peer over his comic book at him. “Like what,  _fishing?_   _Snorkeling?_ I told you, the kid’s not good at anything. All he wants to do is hang around you guys. Around _Rick,”_ he adds, sounding like he can’t understand for the life of him why anyone would want to do that.

Carl pounds his fist into the wall, causing a lazy haze of dust to fall around him.

In the distance, the two figures are vanishing into a house.

 

Lately, night time is the only time Carl ever goes back to the house anymore, and even then he usually beelines up the stairs to his room and straight to bed for fear of seeing something unsettling. Tonight is the same. He hadn’t even glanced toward the sitting room to see if his father or anyone else was there. Maybe he would’ve seen Daryl or Glenn over for a visit. Maybe he would’ve seen Rick reading to Judith while Sam sat listening beside him before helpfully offering to read a page himself. 

Carl turns on the bed, trying to block out the faint sounds from the hallway. Sometimes Sam goes with Rick to tuck in Judith. The boy likes to listen as Rick hums the girl to sleep. He ignores the sounds and tries to focus on sleep.

As Carl is finally drifting off, there's a loud cry. 

_ “Sam, no!” _

Carl grabs a weapon and bolts to the source. His father’s room. There, he finds the man in bed, eyes wide and fully awake. Carl thinks for a moment his father had a nightmare but then he remembers the cry, and his eyes catch onto a glimmer beside the bed. 

Someone else is there.

Sam.

Carl takes in the scene. On the bed, Rick is breathing hard, his sweat-damp hair sticking to his forehead and his shirt is pushed up over his chest. In his patterned pajamas, Sam is sprawled on the floor beside the bed as if he’d fallen off. Or had been pushed.

Carl can see the boy's round, glistening eyes peering up at him from the shadows. When Carl looks closer, he thinks he can make out gleaming pale streaks around his pudgy mouth.

“Car-Carl,” Rick pants out looking horror-stricken from the boy on the ground to his son in the doorway. “I thought—I thought it was you. I didn’t—I didn’t—“

Carl looks to Sam, who, even in the dark, Carl can see has his usual look of helpless confusion.

Although Carl hasn’t said a word, the look on his face must be revealing because the boy is slowly crawling backward from the bed and his already large eyes are swelling to the point that Carl can make out the glowing whites all around the irises.

Suddenly, Sam scrambles toward Carl, shooting past him and into the hallway, where he sprints down the stairs and out the door.

Rick is rising up from the bed to go after him.

“No,” Carl says, finding his voice at last and surprised at how steady it sounds. “I’ll get him.”

“Carl—“

“It’s alright,” Carl says. “It’s my fault anyway.” He looks down at the large knife in his hand and realizes how he must’ve looked to the boy. “I won’t do anything,” he assures when he notices his father too eyeing the weapon. “Don’t worry. Just get cleaned up. I’ll take care of it.”

Rick seems assuaged and looks down at himself. Some milk has spilled down the sides of his chest. Carl hates the implications and only glances briefly. 

“I’ll get him back,” Carl says and Rick nods.

There’s no real danger in Alexandria, not really, but Carl knows the Andersons wouldn’t like to come back from their "date" to find their son had been run off by the very people who were supposed to watch him.

As he roams the streets, Carl thinks on what he'd walked in on. He see’s Rick there on the bed, with his harried expression and damp hair sticking to his forehead, his shirt pushed up beneath his chin.

So, he'd thought it was Carl coming into his room like that, even though it had been a very long time since Carl had attempted a nighttime visit to his father's bed. 

Over the past few weeks, a new distance had been steadily growing between them. In the past Rick had shown a tendency to get sensitive when Carl had pulled away from him. One incident in particular sticks out in his memory. That time in the big vacant house after the prison when Rick had been physically forceful with Carl for the first time. Rick had wanted so badly for Carl to forgive him that he'd offered himself as a kind of consolation. Was that what Rick had done tonight? Was he allowing Carl—or who he thought was Carl— into his bed as a way of mending the gap that was growing between them? 

He wonders how it happened. In his mind, he can hear the soft, dreamy moan when Rick was roused by the feeling of the bed dipping beside him. Was he surprised? Was he pleased? Carl can see him arching his back up off the mattress to let "his son" slide his shirt up over his chest. Had he said his name then, low and breathy in his half-sleep? Carl wonders when Rick realized it wasn’t his son sucking on him. Did he move to stroke the back of the boy’s head in that comforting way that comes so naturally to him, and feel the much shorter hair? Or maybe it was the way Sam was doing it. Probably rough with teeth. The boy couldn’t know what Rick likes and doesn’t like without experience. He imagines Rick, all constricted muscle and short-of-breath, stifling his discomfort as he whispered his soft, strained encouragements: _Good— that's g-good, C-Carl. Easy,_ e-easy _._

Scalding heat is running up the length of Carl’s body, but then he remembers the cry that woke him up.  _Sam no!_  He thinks of Rick shoving the boy away and the genuine shock and confusion he'd seen on the young face when he’d found them. The way Sam stormed out as fast as he could. Carl is struck again by that eerie sense of the familiar.

By the time he finds Sam, Carl has cooled down considerably.

The blonde is sitting huddled up on a curb with his head in his arms. Crying, Carl guesses. He looks up as Carl approaches and for the first time the teen sees more than just a blubbering, tear-streaked face of an over-indulged Alexandria boy. He sees  _himself._  

Sam is wary as Carl takes a seat next to him on the curb, but settles when he assures him that he isn’t in trouble.

They talk.

Carl explains it plainly. He understands that Sam wants to do things for Rick and to take care of him, maybe better than Sam himself understands it. The simple fact is that Rick already has somebody taking care of him, and while Carl appreciates Sam’s efforts, he has it handled. And anyway, Carl continues, with all the time the boy is spending with Rick, who is back home taking care of Sam's own mother?

After a while the boy stares down at the pavement thoughtfully with large eyes, then understanding seems to sink in. When he finally leaves toward his own home, there are no more tears and Carl even thinks the boy has a new sense of purpose.

When he gets home later, Rick is up waiting for him.

“He’s fine,” Carl assures tiredly as Rick gets up and goes to him. “I talked to him. He’s fine. He went back home. Ron's gonna watch him.”

Rick nods appearing to settle a little. “Thank you, Carl. For… doin’ that.” He winces and Carl knows he’s embarrassed, maybe a little guilty. “Carl, I didn’t…” He begins. 

“I know.”

“I thought he was—”

“I know, Dad. It’s fine.” Carl can’t blame him. Carl had seen himself in Sam. He guesses Rick had too.

Rick nods, and even though the furrow in his brow remains, they leave it at that and both go on to bed.

A few days later, they're passing the Andersons' house and see Jessie and Sam in the front yard. Jessie has started a new sculpture of recycled scrap and seems to have recruited Sam as a second pair of hands. She steps back to get a look at her progress and after a moment Sam moves forward to make a minor adjustment. The edit earns a big, approving smile from his mother and Sam seems to swell from the reaction. 

When the pair see Rick and Carl walking back from the Monroe's, they wave and smile. Carl and Rick wave and smile back. Sam’s eyes seem to linger on Rick for a moment more before drifting back to his mother and their project.

Carl looks at Rick and sees something flicker in his eyes for a moment but then it passes. He catches Carl staring and smiles. 

Carl wonders if his father misses having Sam around.

After that long night and the talk, the boy stopped coming around like he used to. Although the youngest Anderson still visits with Carol and even rides his bike through their side of town on occasion, the days when he'd follow Rick around like a doe-eyed shadow seem to have passed.

The idea that Rick might now be missing the boy who had trespassed on their lives for weeks only occurs to Carl days later.

He comes home from helping Carol and Tobin in the garden to find Rick there, having just put Judith down for a nap. It's been a week since his father last left the walls, even just to clear the outer perimeter of Walker buildup, and the man seems strangely sluggish lately. From his open shirt, Carl guesses he'd been nursing Judith before he put her down. The teen glances between the open flaps and freezes.

Rick's nipples are swollen and fiercely inflamed like Judith had not been sucking but nawing on him for upwards of an hour. When Carl had left that morning, he remembers the two had been on the couch together. Now he wonders if Rick had been there nursing her all this time and only stopped moments before Carl's arrival to finally put her down for her nap.

From the look of the raw and bruised-looking nubs, Carl thinks it's a fair assumption.

“Dad,” he says, alerting the man to his presence.

Rick, noticing the look on his son’s face, looks down at himself. “Oh,” he say. “It’s nothin’. Just went a little long. Musta fell asleep. It's alright.” He ruffles through a drawer, looking for the ointment, Carl guesses.

Carl knows that when Rick has a rough day or is feeling low, he lets Judith feed on him for much longer than he should. He and Daryl have caught evidence of his painful habit and scolded him for it in the past. Carl doesn't understand it. He knows it must hurt Rick and he always runs out of milk, yet the act seems to ease him somehow. Carl thinks it must be like how Daryl will leave on his bike for long periods of time when he gets restless in the walls, or how Eric goes in his backyard to smoke cigarettes after a disagreement with Aaron. Letting Judith go on feeding from him seems to give Rick comfort.

Carl gauges the sullen shadows beneath his father's eyes and then his chest, which looks as painfully over-used now as it did back when Judith was first teething.

“Wait there,” Carl says then goes to grab something from the other room. When he returns, he holds Rick’s gaze. “Can I…” he says.

Rick looks unsure, blue eyes shifting between his son’s face and the ice cube in his hand. “I—I don’t…”

“It’ll help,” Carl says and takes a cautious step forward.

Rick opens his mouth, appearing to grasp for something and finally settling on, “it’s, uh, cold, Carl. It's—”

“It’s alright, Dad.” Carl soothes, taking another step. Then instead of pressing the ice cube to Rick’s chest, he slides it into his own mouth.

Rick’s voice seems to dry up then. He can only watch as Carl leans down. 

Suddenly, hands shoot to his shoulders and shuddering gasps fill his ears. Carl grips his father's hips to brace himself. Rick doesn’t push him away but Carl works like he might do so at any moment, sucking and nipping vigorously at the already-awakened nipple. The added ice makes for an entirely new sensation and Carl guesses from the reaction that Rick thinks so too. Carl does his best to make use of this new tool, teaming up on one tender little bud with a blend of icy cold solid and soft, wriggling heat. When he’s harassed one nipple to a stony, erect pillar, he moves to the other, earning new gasps and a fresh wave of goosebumps.

As Carl uses his mouth to make his father writhe and shudder against him, he realizes all at once how wrong he’d been in seeing himself in Sam. Although the boy may be drawn to Rick and he may want to please him and make him happy, Sam could never take care of the man, not the way Rick needs. Rick needs someone who’s both strong and gentle, someone who can protect him from harm and comfort him when he’s low, someone to provide for him and make him feel safe. Sam isn’t prepared to do all that. Sam’s just a kid.  No. Rick needs a man. Rick needs…

Rick needs…

“Carl…” Comes the breathy sigh.

By the time the ice has fully melted, Rick is breathing deeply and his grip on Carl’s shoulders has weakened.

When he pulls away to look at his father, Carl is surprised that his own breathing has grown labored “Is it..is it better?” He asks.

Rick swallows, eyeing his son beneath drowsy lids. “Yeah,” he says at last. “Yeah, Carl. That’s…that’s better.”

Later in bed, as Carl replays the events of the day, he hears Rick's words ring in his head and fixates again on the change in his father's voice.   Although it's true that it may not be  the one he'd used with Carl as a boy, nor the one he uses now with Judith or Sam, it’s deep and low and gentle in a different way and Carl thinks he can grow to like it very much.

 


End file.
